A Sense of Humor

The first thing you lose when you move into a foreign culture, is your sense of humor. You do not actually lose it, but in order to be funny, you have to master a foreign language, which is hardly my case.

And so if in the past you used to be a rather witty table companion, these days you have become one of the dullest members at any social gathering.

K. in action. "You know, I really don't like the wine. Can I have another glass?"

In the very beginning this bothered me quite a bit. After all, I had been quite an intelligent woman (I thought) back home, yet could not say a whole lot of smart things here in Beirut. Let alone funny things. But we’ve gotten to a point where you rarely have an ‘Arabic-speaking-only’ crowd in this town, and so this social isolation is not much of a problem. But the humor issue remains, well, an issue.

لديك شعور كبير من الهزل

Humor is considered to be very culturally specific. The Dutch have in general a rather dark ironic and sarcastic sense of humor, quite close to the British and Australian one. The Lebanese sense of humor is not that far off, once you get past the Abu Abed jokes. Still, the language & culture barrier is there, even if it is in English. There’s a whole lot of stuff and innuendo that nobody ‘gets’, only the Dutch.

P. and H. in action; sharing each others (Lebanese) husbands abilities' to go camping.

So last night, when Joke (no pun intended, this is really her name. It is pronounced as Jo-kuh) got a lot of Dutch together in her house up in Broumanna, all we did was laugh. We didn’t need intelligent table conversations, we just needed to laugh.