Early on in my relationship with Vincent, I coined the term culture bumps to describe those minor communication breakdowns that trip you up in an intercultural couple. The kind of things that make you just go “what the hell are you talking about?”
I’m referring to little stuff; crossed wires that usually make us laugh and are surprisingly enlightening. (We do run into some culture walls occasionally, too. Those can be brutal, but it’s fascinating to deconstruct them.)
Lately I’ve been maxed out, stressed out and burned out. I am in dire need of a basket weaving class.
But what I decided to do, to give myself a daily moment of zen, was to subscribe to icanhascheezburger, home of the LOLcats, which my 23-year-old son turned me on to last summer. It’s a guilty pleasure. (Very guilty.)
If you don’t know about the lolcats, basically the site is set up so that people can upload cute/funny cat and other animal pictures and add silly captions to them. Some of them are stupid. But frankly, I’m surprised to see how clever some of the captions are, even though they’re all written in some kind of illiterate, gawd-knows-what form of English.
Here’s the problem: Vincent can’t abide the Lolcats. It’s partly him and partly a culture bump.
I saw this one today (translation: Crazy Cat Lady Starter Kit), and I laughed out loud. I got such a kick out of it that I described it to Vincent, trying to convey the hilarity (he hadn’t leapt up to see it when I said what it was that had made me laugh). No dice. He didn’t have a cultural reference for what a crazy cat lady is, for starters. I explained. Blank stare. I guess they don’t have them here…
Then he launched into a mini diatribe (a very French thing) about how he hated them because they were the lowest of lowbrow, the online equivalent of paintings on black velvet, the epitome of bad taste, that he hated the cutesiness because it’s the basest form of sentimentality, that they’re barely one notch above fart jokes… And he can’t stand the anthropomorphism.
(I don’t know where he got that high horse; he watches Prison Break, which you wouldn’t catch me dead in front of.)
Then of course, there was the requisite disparaging comment about lolcat language and the captions. Now, the language thing I can understand, but I can overlook it. I defended the captions saying that we (Americans) are really good at one-liners.
To which he responded “Short,” which was a thinly disguised barb directed at Americans’ level of discourse, command of language, and attention span.
To which I responded “Succinct,” which was a thinly disguised barb at French pomposity and verbosity.
It ended with him saying that none of his criticisms would matter if the lolcats made him laugh. But they don’t.
Oh well. The French have a different idea of fun and funny. As I’ve said before, they tend to be a serious bunch. But I need a little shot of good old dopey humor every now and then. It’s in my genes.
If you’re in a Franco-American couple or have any other reason to want to understand la différence, I recommend French and Americans: The Other Shore by Pascal Baudry (a psychoanalyst, among other things). It’s a serious work, but accessible; certainly not the usual why-are-the-French-so-French pap.
I haven’t read the whole thing, but what I have read is excellent (and useful). You can download a free PDF of the English translation, or buy the book on the author’s site.
