A subject close to my heart is comedy, or humor. There seems to be some universal law that only people in English-speaking countries can be funny. On the continent of Europe, from Germany to Spain to Italy to Romania, almost all jokes and attempts at humor are crude, unsophisticated and generally not that funny, the worst crime of all. I swear I could write a computer script to generate jokes in Romanian, which are always based on one of two things: making fun of how someone else talks or the difference between women and men.

My Romanian isn’t good enough to make subtle interplay about different accents and grammar and I find most men/women jokes to be trite and utterly banal, not to mention patently misogynistic. But still, I’ve lived here long enough to know that Romanians like to laugh, and so I try my best to inject a little levity in life here. It’s relatively easy to do face-to-face but with writing, one must be a little more subtle.

Case in point is my last post, which I am realizing was way, way too subtle. I hate television shows or movies which must belabor a joke so that it’s understood by everyone, but I’m going to do it today.

Earlier this week, I posted an article called Cat Scandal. Someone made me incredibly happy by getting the humor of the fact that the title in English would also make sense in Romanian if the “a” in the title had a hat, making it cât scandal or “so many scandals” or “what a scandal”, a reference to the fact that I humorously implicated my pets in the Wikileaks telegrams. Bravo to you, sir or madam, for getting that!

Here’s the secret: just about every single one of my posts has a number of nested “jokes” or Easter eggs embedded in them. The very category of the post that you’re currently reading is “blog бизнес”. The word “бизнес” is just Cyrillic for the word “business”. Why is this “funny”? Because it’s a word that Russians (and others) have appropriated from English and spelled phonetically to be “cool”.

Therefore I’m going to “pull back the curtain” on my last post and explain it to death:

1. I don’t eat meat. Therefore all the references to buying or eating meat are completely bogus. I have an entire blog dedicated to eating raw vegetables so I was hoping this would be an obvious tip-off that the entire article was meant to be comedy. Not one part of this conversation ever happened in reality.
2. My supposed American friend hopes to understand Romanian with their knowledge of Spanish. Clearly Spanish is much more closely related to Romanian than English is, linguistically speaking, and yet every sentence in the Romainan portion contains a word borrowed from English. Therefore the “joke” is that English is the language that’s needed to understand my Romanian and in fact, Spanish would’ve been entirely useless in this context.
3. The “punch-line” is that even though the American speaks fluent English, they don’t understand a word of the Romanian I “spoke” that had an English word in literally every sentence.
4. I also don’t drive a car and haven’t owned one for years.
5. I loathe the mall and never, ever shop there. I also hate spectator sports. Furthermore, I don’t even own a television and certainly wouldn’t watch one at a bar.
6. I also never eat fast food and especially not McDonald’s. Goodness!
7. I write for a living. I certainly have never held a job in Romania, or for a company in Romania. I’m not even eligible to work a regular job here. Therefore I’m definitely not going to job interviews.
8. Another “joke” is that the English words are all spelled phonetically according to Romanian.
9. The English words all fall into just a handful of categories: sports, junk food, capitalist stuff (mall, job, expensive car, etc) and slang words. Since my “friend” is American, this is a commentary on what’s clearly being imported here in Romania (mostly from America), both the products themselves as well as the adoption of the words in the Romanian language.
10. The word “cunning linguist” is “funny” because it’s a quasi-homonym (and therefore a pun) on a sexual act.
11. The other “joke” is that clearly neither the “American” nor I are actually that good at languages. The Romanian contains mistakes and the “American” patently fails to identify even a single word of English origin in my speech. Therefore neither of us is a skilled linguist.
12. Just about every English word in my “Romanian” speech is so distorted or else declined according to Romanian syntax that it’s really not English anymore, even though some words (camping, parking, etc) look like they’re unmodified English. British people, for instance, would say “car park” while Americans would say “parking lot“. There’s really no such thing as “a parking” ;)
13. The entire Romanian speech could be understood by a Romanian who literally speaks zero English. This is a subtle interplay with the “fact” that the American, who does speak English, did not understand a single word I said.
14. Two of the “English” words I used in the Romanian part (7 Days and Bake Rolls) are technically English words but make zero sense to someone who actually speaks English. That’s my way of pointing out how ridiculous some brand names are in Romania.
15. I deliberately combined words of British origin with words of American origin.
16. “Cola Light” does not exist in English-speaking countries. It’s called “Diet Coke” in Britain and America. It’s only called “Cola Light” in countries that don’t speak English.
17. And last but not least, since the vast majority of my readers are bilingual in English and Romanian, I thought it would be humorous to allude to that.

There’s an old truism that if you have to explain a joke, it wasn’t funny. Hey, I admit it, I can’t write a “winner” every time. So it goes!

Anyway, now you know my “secret”. If you like it, or “get” it, that’s awesome. If not, well that’s okay too. I write these blog posts knowing that they will remain in “cyberspace” for months and years and hopefully they will continue to provide at least some modicum of entertainment to someone, somewhere down the line.

And last but not least: at the top of this post is a link to a YouTube video, which is entitled “Let Down the Top”. The title of my post is a lyric from that song. The song is in English but written in such heavy “black” slang that few people would be able to understand it (even native English speakers), my attempt at trying to be subtle and allude to the fact that my “Cunning Linguist” post was in Romglish and not understood by the “American”. And “let down the top” means to open a car to the elements, similar to how this post exposes my Easter egg jokes in the last post.

Oh, and “26’s on the candy painted” means custom (enormous) rims that measure 26 inches in diameter (66cm) on the wheels of a car that is “candy” painted, or painted in a very shiny way so that it’s as glossy as a beloved American dessert. Therefore the color of the car with the oversized rims is candy apple red and is meant to be very “cool” and impressive in African-American culture. Obviously, this post isn’t equally as cool :))

AND NOW YOU KNOW!