Strictly Come Dancing is a British TV show. It's a programme where personalities are paired with professional dancers in a dance competition. Two of the names from the show, Anton and Giovanni, a judge and a dancer, have been able to exploit their semi celebrity status to feature in another British TV programme which follows them as they travel around Spain. In one episode they were talking to a Flamenco dancer who we'd been introduced to us as an 80 year old. Anton asked her when she had started dancing. Her answer was since she was 25. Anton countered with - "Ah, about five years ago then?". The woman put him right. "I'm much older than that," she said. The woman didn't pick up on the humour in Anton's comment. He did it again a couple of weeks later "You have six children - really? So that was before you got a telly then?". The person being asked the question didn't see the link about how she filled her leisure time. "No, we had a telly long before."
I can't help it. If a Spanish person tells me, for instance, they have a puncture I ask them if it hurts. They think I'm daft and don't understand what they said. Sometimes, when there is either the time or inclination to explain or to unpick the exchange we get into a conversation about the peculiarities of British humour. Spaniards know that there is something called British humour, it has a Wikipedia entry.
My partner says that Spanish humour is very slapstick, a bit unrefined. It's absolutely true that several successful Spanish comedy films of the last couple of years feature a lot of things like breakages, excrement and damage to male genitalia. I'm a bit out of touch with British humorists but back in the 20th Century people like Benny Hill, the Only Fools and Horses crew, Mr Bean or Morecambe and Wise were often quite physical and slapstick too. John Cleese hitting Manuel or thrashing his car is hardly subtle. On Spanish telly there was, for a while, a thing called The Comedy Club and, but for the fact that it was in Spanish, the stand-ups there could have been on any British stand-up show. A recent Spanish film was about a Catalan comedian called Eugenio, basically he told jokes in much the same way that I understand Jimmy Carr does and, if that's not right then maybe I could say that Bob Monkhouse or Dave Allen were joke tellers. I don't know much situation comedy on Spanish TV but that said La que se avecina is a popular Spanish sitcom and, for good measure, there's also quite a subtle pun in the title, that's where the subtlety ends.
So, because I quite frequently end up in the aforementioned conversation about British humour I thought there might be meat enough for a blog. The trouble is that when I started to look for differences I had some trouble finding anything that was significantly different, except for maybe a lot more word play. Wikipedia was very little help so I asked one of the artificial intelligence programmes for the difference. This is what it came up with before it started to ramble on about wearing sandals in winter.
"Spanish humour often employs a digressive style, leading listeners through various directions before reaching a conclusion. Physical humour, repetition, hyperbole, and satire resonate well with a Spanish audience while British humour leans toward irony, surprise, and sarcasm. British humour is renowned for its subtlety, wit, dry humour, self-deprecation, clever wordplay and innuendo while humour in Spain reflects the country’s passionate and expressive nature and thrives on absurdity, and exaggerated scenarios".
The first time, and I'm sure not the last, where artificial intelligence provides the words that I can't.
The photo by the way is Gila who used the same gag for years - "Hello, is this the enemy?
