Very droll

摘要

'Baron, how did you find the English?' 'Very distracting. They have a form of conversation called humour, which makes everyone laugh a lot.' 'Humour-is this like esprit?' 'No, not really.' 'But then how do you translate it?' 'Well, I can't. We in France don't have a word for it.' This scene in the film "Ridicule", by Patrice Leconte, shows a marquis at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles telling other courtiers and their crinolined companions about his discovery of humour during a trip to England. He tries to illustrate this peculiar phenomenon by telling a joke he has heard in England. No one laughs until another courtier adds a witty, slightly dirty remark to the English joke. Does humour exist in France? Before the French revolution of 1789, the word humour was hardly known. People knew esprit (wit), farce (prank), bouffonnerie (drollery) and humeur (a state of mind, or mood), but not humour. Only in 1878 did the French Academy, the institution that stands guard over the French language, accept humoristique as a French word. A year later Edmond de Goncourt used humour without italics as a French word in his novel "Les Freres Zemganno", but not until 1932 did the academicians give their approval to the noun humour.