Today, I was reading Le Figaro and found an article about France’s “Top 50 Personalities”, a survey conducted twice a year to see who is the most famous French celebrity in France.
Link: Top 50 French Personalities
I’m sorry to say that my girl Carla only reached the 50th spot this time around, but never fear! It was her first time on the list and she only started becoming popular with the people of France around March, when her relationship with Sarkozy exploded. I expect her rank to increase, very, very soon.
Equally unfortunate is Sarkozy’s ranking– 44th, down 12 spots from six months ago. I’ll let that speak for itself.
The “coveted” number one spot was given to Yannick Noah, a former tennis player, now musician, who has been active in charity work. He is the guy who trademarked the tennis move where you hit the ball between your legs. From my experience, I can safely tell you that this move is often imitated, but never matched.
However, Noah isn’t who I wanted to focus on today (no offense to the Noah lovers out there). Instead, I want to talk about who came second in the survey: Dany Boon.
Dany Boon is a French comedian and actor who became extremely popular this past March with the movie Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, translated into Welcome to the Land of the Sh’tis (though I personally hate this translation). The movie managed to break box office records, earning $39.7 million in it’s first week. Sadly, this is only second to Titanic (but only sadly because it’s Titanic).
Boon comes from Nord-pas-de-Calais, a region in the northernmost part of France. Just as America’s regions have certain stereotypes, so do the regions of France! The Northerners are often considered as unusually stupid (this region has a mining tradition), and are characterized by their strange “accent”, which is really just their own local dialect.
Now, Boon loves his roots and so he wrote Bienvenue almost entirely in the local dialect, known as Ch’ti. Before he knew it, his simple comedy about a Southerner sent to the North on business became an instant hit and now the subject of this blog post!
Culturally, I found this extremely interesting because here is a movie that the French love, but that other cultures will never understand. This movie is literally untranslatable— there is simply no way to translate the awkward misunderstandings that occur because of the local dialect. To a non-Francophone, Ch’ti sounds like French and nothing more.
Obviously I’m not the most French-fluent American ever known to man, but I don’t understand much of anything that’s said in Ch’ti so consequently the humor falls flat for me. Apparently, a native French speaker can understand what they are saying with the exception of radically different phrases.
Personally, this is really frustrating; there is a movie on this planet that I may never understand unless someone explains everything to me! Doesn’t it kind of make you wish you knew what you were missing?
So I researched a little Ch’ti to see what the major differences were, but the differences are EXTENSIVE, and I suppose I don’t care that much about the movie… I’ll stick with my French comedy classics thank you very much.
My research did yield a funny nugget of Ch’ti-ism, however. At www.Chti.org you’ll find funny stories with Ch’ti sound recordings to go with them, so I present to you a story entitled “Les tampax”…
Dialogue in Ch’ti:
Le petit Cafougnette discute avec un copain dans la cour de l’école
PETIT CAFOUGNETTE: T’as d’mindé quoi, ti, à ch’Père Noël ?
COPAIN: Mi, j’ai d’mindé un train électrique, et ti ?
P.C.: Mi, j’ai d’mindé des tampax !
COPAIN: Quo qu’ch’est qu’cha ?
P.C.: J’n'in sais rien ! Mais avec, té peux faire du vélo, du bidet, de l’gym et pis nager à l’piscine !
English translation:
Little Cafougnette and his friend are having a discussion during class.
CAFOUGNETTE: What’d you ask Santa Claus for this year?
FRIEND: Me, I asked for an electric train. What about you?
CAFOUGNETTE: I asked for tampax!
FRIEND: What’s that?
CAFOUGNETTE: Oh, I don’t know… but with them you can bike ride, ride a horse, go to the gym and even swim at the pool!
And you say tobacco companies are corrupting our youth through ads… while we let tampon companies run rampant?!
Laisse tes commentaires!
Only Zinedine Zidane is famous in the rest of the world !
I saw this recently and didn’t enjoy it at all. It was nothing to do with not understanding the dialectical (is there such a word) differences -I just found it not very funny. It was predictable – the country bumpkins with a heart of gold – there were no surprises.