Philadelphia Weekly

On most weeknights, I travel to Paris in my mind, joining my daughter, Sionann, who lives there, nine hours ahead of me in time, a continent and an ocean away in space. I stare blankly at the pages of a book, or wool-gather in front of the TV while my mind lopes over to France to accompany my kid as she rises in the early morning, gets ready for work, descends five flights of stairs, and gets in the cab that’s been dispatched to pick her up while much of Paris still sleeps.

He will drop her at the offices of Canal Plus, a French cable TV network. Her employer pays the cab fare, but Sionann is a generous tipper out of pocket because she has known the struggle that attends being a stranger in a strange land, even a land as mindful of social welfare as France tends to be.

When she enters the offices where her team of translators is already assembling, she hears some of them laughing, a sign that today’s work, while sure to be challenging, is also likely to be fun. She shrugs out of her coat and begins the job of translating Comedy Central’s The Daily Show into French, rendering hip American cultural references, Yiddishisms, bleeped-out expletives, and quirky American slang into something a French audience will understand and find funny.

As an example, The Daily Show used to have a running segment about Dick Cheney called “You Don’t Know Dick.” That is an amusing and vaguely risque pun for American audiences, but how do you make that phrase funny when the same pun on Cheney’s first name doesn’t exist in French?

Or how does one bridge the gap found in a gag during the presidential primaries in which The Daily Show’s writers riffed on the resemblance between then-presidential candidate Fred Thompson and Count Frankenberry, of American breakfast cereal fame. Count Frankenberry isn’t found in aisles of French supermarchés, so the translators were left with the problem of making the allusion make sense without slowing down the pace of the show.

Nor is the precise equivalent from English to French always the way to go. The logo for the running segment in which Stewart and his crew of “reporters” covered the American election was called “Indecision 2008,” a mild witticism satirizing the names the “real” news shows give their election coverage. “Indecision” has a cognate in French, but it isn’t funny, so the team substituted the phrase “Foire aux candidat,” a phrase that, in colloquial French, evokes a kind of bargain basement sale of political candidates, and is far funnier in translation than simply using “indecision,” the more exact equivalent.

Every single show presents challenges that must be overcome. When Sionann first met with her team of three translators—all French—they were often confused about what was so funny, but now, having done the show for nearly two years, they “get” some of the jokes without my daughter’s explanations.

My daughter often finds her way into interesting work, but I never heard the joy in her voice I hear when she’s talking about her current work on The Daily Show. Every day’s script provides an ample array of problems to solve, all of them on a tight deadline. Sionann and her crew have roughly seven hours to transform the day’s offering of wry commentary on American news into something that remains funny in French.

But there is another aspect to her work, a mission she’s been on since long before she took The Daily Show job. It’s a mission lots of American ex-patriots are destined to perform wherever they are in the world. For all of my daughter’s years in France, she has been an ex-officio ambassador for her country, arguing against stereotypes of Americans as arrogant, bellicose, ignorant, imperious, rude, and loutish. That mission was much more challenging over the term of the Bush administration, a time when American ignorance and arrogance were disproportionately on display, from “Freedom Fries” to “”Bring ‘em on.” And it surely didn’t help win European friends and influence European people when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld airily dismissed “old Europe.”

My daughter, in her small way, has helped remind the French of an America that has gotten lost in recent years, an America found again in the election of Barack Obama, but held in memory through translation. The self-deprecating humor of The Daily Show is American humor, made by and for a brash and freewheeling people of independent mind and spirit, able to laugh at ourselves and at our leaders. When the snootier French intellectuals mocked the worst examples of American hubris during the Bush years, Jon Stewart and Co. made us human again, revealing a nation groaning under the yoke of its own follies and misdeeds, laughing through tears at our own national fallibility.

So, whether she’s thought about it or not, it has been part of my daughter’s mission each morning to remind the French of the can-do nation that fought fascism and liberated them from the Nazis. That nation is still here, lost for a time in a wilderness of our own making, but using humor to sustain us until we found our way again.