Na sexta feira passada, fui ver um espetáculo do humorista Luís Franco-Bastos no Teatro Leicester Square. Acabou tarde e tive de imitar Fernão de Magalhães para chegar no meu covil porque parte da rede de transportes públicos estava com atrasos por causa dum acidente.
Mas valeu a pena! Gostei da sensação de ouvir duas horas de comédia e de entender quase tudo. Ao contrário do Manuel Cardoso, (cuja fala é composta exclusivamente de consoantes) Luís Franco-Bastos é um profissional treinado no uso de vogais também, o que torna as suas piadas mais fáceis de perceber. Havia anedotas sobre o seu novo carro, a sua tentativa de ser pai recorrendo à inseminação artificial, classes pré-parto, e os seus pais, entre outros assuntos. Perdi o fio à meada de vez em quando porque me fez lembrar cenas da minha própria vida, mas efetivamente, quando escutei com atenção, percebi tudo, até os palavrões (dos quais havia muitos!) e soltei umas boas gargalhadas, sobretudo quando imitou o treinador de pré-parto.
Gostaria de ver mais humoristas portugueses quando houver hipótese.
Hey, I didn’t tell you about my trip to Islington to see Manuel Cardoso’s gig, did I? I should do it in Portuguese, really, but my brain is still broken and I’m still feeling pretty terrible with the… cold or the sinus infection or whatever it is, so I’m going to take the coward’s way out and write in english instead.
The venue is called The Bill Murray and it’s near The Angel, one of my favourite parts of town, behind the Union Chapel. You have to get off Essex Road and go down a few very boring roads to get to the actual spot though. It’s like a small pub with the back room converted into a venue that holds maybe a hundred people on small chairs around a low square stage about five feet by five. I got there quite early and sat down at the side of the room, but it started to fill up and I moved to allow a couple to sit together. That left me in one of the only remaining empty chairs: right at the edge of the stage where I could reach out and touch the mic stand if I wanted to. I could hear people talking english, including the announcer. I started thinking, well, I guess the show’s going to be in english. Disappointing.
It wasn’t though! As soon as he came on, he started in portuguese, but he read the room and asked “por palmas” , (by round of applause) how many portuguese people were in. Then he asked had anyone brought a non-portuguese friend with them who didn’t speak the language. A few boyfriends were pointed at and raised their hands sheepishly. There might have been a few who had come on their own and didn’t even understand the question but we’ll never know. Anyway, he told them they were in for a rough ride and gave them a joke in english – an off-colour gag about Ronaldo – and then went back to his routine. I was really, really close to where he was standing and I felt a bit self conscious. If I looked completely baffled I was going to stand out like a sore thumb at that range, so I made sure not to let my expression go slack at any point.
I actually understood most of it though, thank god. Obviously, he was talking fast, using a lot of slang, and talking about things that would only make sense if you were steeped in the culture, so there were definitely gaps, but I laughed extra-loudly at the jokes I actually got, partly because they were funny, and partly because I was so happy to have understood them. I was especially glad to get the ones that made reference to pop culture memes: “My sex life is like Leiria. It exists, but it’s not that amazing” for example. Or politics “João Galamba was found to have weed in his house… well, at last we have a politician ‘sem filtro'”.
Sometimes, I got the words but not why it was funny. Like there was a stretch where he was pretending to be a lovestruck man talking to his girlfriend on the phone and I laughed at alost every protestation of love he made, but one of the compliments he gave her was that her breasts were like chips ahoy cookies. Er… OK…
Other times, I totally missed the reference. Like, at one point everyone in the room did that sort of wincing laughter, you know, when someone makes a really near-the-knuckle joke. He was already doing a routine about kidnapping children, which I wasn’t really vibing with, but people seemed to be enjoying, but he said something about you can’t just walk into the Hotel da Luz and steal a baby. “Now, the Praia de Luz, on the other hand…” I didn’t get it straight away but obviously should have guessed it was a Madeleine McCann reference. That’s an example where you’d probably laugh from the shock value if the timing was right, but if you’re on a slight delay while your brain processes it, the effect is lost.
The whole thing was over pretty quickly: started at 6.30 and finished by 7.30. I really enjoyed it though, and I definitely want to do this again. I must follow more comedians on instagram so I can see when their tours are coming up.
So according to my socials this morning, this comedian guy has been thrown off Instagram for making a Barbie joke. Let’s pick it apart and extract the juicy vocabulary goodness within.
“A Mattel lançou uma Barbie com Trissomia 21, uma edição especial. Não é uma ideia original, toda a gente sabe que os chineses já vendem bonecas com defeito”
The what now?
Trissomia rang a bell but I couldn’t quite place it so I looked it up, but of course I should have just read the text below, because it’s explained there: Downs Syndrome. Oof. OK, well if you’re going to go there, you’d better make it a good joke, because people don’t tend to be very sympathetic if you’re just going to be pointlessly spiteful and cruel.
The joke hinges on the word “Defeito”. I looked it up in some Brazilian and portuguese dictionaries to see if there was a meaning of defeito that would make it gel into a joke. For example, is “defeito” a standard, non-insulting way to describe a learning disability? If so, it would still be a shitehawk joke, but at least we’d be able to see that he was going for an actual double-meaning and the the joke would just about work as a critique of Chinese manufacturing. It doesn’t seem to be though. Learning disability in portuguese is “deficiência mental”, which, if you translate it to its english cognates still sounds pretty off but obviously words have slightly different weights in different cultures, so I can only assume it doesn’t sound insulting to native speakers. When I look up “pessoas com defeitos”, all the listings relate to people who are arrogant or lazy or have some other character defect. So it doesn’t really work. I get that he’s having a pop at Chinese manufacturing but in the process I think he’s just saying people with Down’s are defective. Which just seems cruel to me.
So yeah, it’s just a shitehawk joke. I don’t think he should have been thrown off Instagram for it though. People like Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle have been making shittier jokes than that for years and they never seem to be short of work. Of course their jokes are also quite well crafted, so there’s that.
Instagram could have just left it there and let the lack of laughs and the virtual heckles act as their own negative reinforcement mechanism, but that’s not how it played out.
Luso 