The Return of My Sense of Humor

...or maybe it never actually left. Several posts ago, I wrote about how frustrating it was (is) to try to maintain your sense of humor in another language. It's a kind of "lost in translation" deal a lot of times. Well, buenas noticias... maybe I'm not as "un-funny" as I once thought. At least according to Diego - who, I admit, is probably biased. But still, it made me feel better when in a conversation recently, he told me that his friends did think I was funny. Now, maybe what they really find funny is this gringa trying to speak Spanish and throw some Chilean slang in the mix, but I'd like to think they find my sense of humor funny as well.

Here's another thing: I remember in the beginning of January (I think this is when it was), when I first started watching Club de la Comedia with Diego and his family/friends. If you haven't seen that show, there's a cast of 6 Chileans who do a mix of stand-up routines and regular skits. When I first started watching, I didn't understand a whole lot of it. So, if you want the definition of awkward - that would be me trying to watch that show with a group of Chilean friends and not understanding hardly anything. So naturally, everyone else is cracking up and I have this half-smile plastered to my face the entire time, hanging on every word, desperately trying to seize upon some joke that I might understand - all so that I could laugh too, and be in on the joke! So needless to say, it was really frustrating at the beginning. But I kept watching, and by the time I left Santiago in March, I found that I understood a great deal of the show. And it cracked me up whenever I would laugh at one of the jokes, and D's mom would look at me in surprise and say, "You understood that?!"... yes, I finally did!

My favorite sketches were always "El Cliente Siempre Tiene La Razón" (The customer is always right) and El Encuestador (a guy showing up at people's houses to conduct a survey). Whenever I'm missing Chile a whole lot (which is basically all the time!), I watch some of the sketches online (www.chilevision.cl) and it always makes me laugh. ;)