Comedy About The French As They Actually Are: Specific, Stylish, And Slightly Suspicious Of You Specifically
The French Satire section is The Paris Fool’s cultural beat. Where Paris Satire covers the city and France Satire covers the state, this section covers the people: their habits, their language, their meals, their silences, their gestures, their compliments (which are technically insults), their insults (which are technically affectionate), and the thousand small rituals that make French daily life specifically, irreducibly French.
The Beats
Language. Pronunciation guides that mock both speaker and listener equally. Phrases that mean one thing in French and nothing at all in English, including several that mean nothing in French either but have been in use since the Third Republic and cannot now be questioned. The shrug as a grammatical unit. The double-cheek kiss and its rules, which vary by region, family, and how well you know the person, with no reliable method for determining any of these factors in advance.
Food. The cheese course. The correct order of courses, which is not the order you assumed. The bread, which is not for the aperitif, except when it is. The wine, which is not the house wine, except when the house wine is perfectly fine, which it often is, but you cannot say so without implying that you do not know better, which you clearly do not. Anouk Vermeil covers food from her cafe table and considers this a conflict of interest that she intends to lean into.
Manners. The polite formula that ends a conversation by ensuring it is never resumed. The apology that is not an apology. The agreement that is not agreement but is the French way of declining to disagree in public, which is different. The door held open for slightly too long, creating a social obligation at a distance of twelve meters.
Fashion. The rules exist. They contradict each other. They cannot be explained to a foreigner without the foreigner immediately violating them. Margaux de Vaucouleurs covers this beat and maintains that she is not above it, which is a very French position and also the correct one.
On Mockery With Affection
Mockery without affection is just complaint. Complaint is already the national sport. The Paris Fool covers French culture with the genuine interest of people who live here, read here, and eat here, and who have developed, over time, the affectionate exasperation that is the honest response to Paris at close range. We get the small things right because the small things are where the comedy actually lives. The big stereotypes are too easy. The specific detail of the specific rule about the specific bread at the specific kind of meal — that is where we work.
A Note On The French
The French are excellent targets for satire partly because they are large, available, and full of contradictions, and partly because they have been doing it to themselves longer than we have. Le Canard Enchaine, the great French satirical weekly, has been mocking French public life since 1915. We are relative newcomers working in the same tradition, in English, with the outsider’s slight advantage of finding things remarkable that the French have long since stopped noticing.
Cultural tips and language disasters: Whistle-baguette. Tel: +33698824738. 48 Rue Saint-Honore, 75001 Paris.
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