My Humor Is American, My Passport Is Not
How American-ness became my benchmark for making friends
If they gave away green cards for the best Ross (Friends) impression, I would be walking my dog in Central Park by now.
My American sitcom obsession began in the late nineties when a new channel was introduced to our mostly Arabic TV guide. This channel would broadcast American movies and sitcoms all day. The reason this was a big deal is that other channels would usually play one English-spoken movie a day (maybe two on weekends) in their entire schedule. This was a revolution.
And so, I grew up watching and re-watching Friends, Seinfeld, Becker, and Frasier, How I Met Your Mother (to name a few) before binge watching was even a thing. If it was on TV and it had a laugh track, I was on it. But there were uncalculated side effects.
I embraced the content with ease. I was always good with languages, top of my class. My accent, or lack thereof, consistently impressed my English teachers year after year. And even as a young kid, I barely needed any subtitles to get the joke.
To get the joke, though, you needed to understand both the language and the pop culture references. The language, most people understood. And if they didn’t understand, subtitles could fix that. The cultural references, however, were lost in translation. This was what I stumbled upon watching these shows, a peephole into American pop culture.
Hours upon hours of episodes introduced me to pop culture references that I wouldn’t otherwise come across in my day-to-day life. From Star Wars jokes to Monica Lewinski jokes, the list was long. So, when people told me they didn’t really like Friends for example, I took that to mean they most likely didn’t get Friends. They hadn’t mastered the combination of language and culture enough to understand the final punch line.
For a while as a teenager, I lived as an expat in Saudi Arabia. In a residential compound with other expats from all over the middle east. Our common speaking language was English, and our common pop culture was American even though most of us had not set foot in the US at the time. That is how big the influence of American culture is in the middle east and probably elsewhere as well.
Thinking back on it now, we were a rich potluck of cultures. We could have spent our time exploring our differences and teaching each other something new about each other’s countries. Instead, we all dismissed our own cultures and discussed American songs, movies, shows, video games, and even politics.
I can’t really blame us, we were kids, and the coolest (I’m a millennial, I haven’t kept up with other words for “cool”) kids were the most American-resembling ones. The ones who went to the American schools, the ones with the flawless accents, the ones most up to speed on pop culture references. We shared the same sense of humor and wit, and harmony reigned in our little middle eastern-based, American-washed compound in Riyadh.
Did I realize at the time that I was at a critical age that formed a huge chunk of my personality, values, and sense of humor? Maybe not.
For university, I went back to my hometown in Egypt after years of living in my culturally challenged bubble abroad. Now a little bit of context. Egyptians are known for their witty sense of humor and light-heartedness. You can easily spark conversation with a cab driver or a fellow subway passenger with a light joke and they would happily chime in with their own. We take pride in our quick wit and pan-Arab famous actors and comedians. And while I did possess a sense of humor, it was not “Egyptian” in the slightest.
I was quick to make friends at my university. One particular phenomenon, however, kept happening and was becoming a bit of a nuisance. A conversation would start among a group of friends, someone would throw a punch line, laughs erupted, and I’m left with a blank impression and a slim hope of someone dropping a clue as to what was so funny.
I could not, for the life of me, pick up on Egyptian pop culture jokes especially those based on Egyptian movies. To add insult to injury, when I tried to reciprocate with my own brand of humor, my words fell flat or were met with mild confusion. I have the cape and yet I cannot fly. I quickly realized that even though we all spoke Arabic we were speaking in different languages.
So, I started doing something that, in retrospect, I’m not very proud of. I classified people. People who had flawless accents when they spoke English, who read the same books as me, watched the same shows as me, and understood sharp sarcasm. Those were worth hanging around. Everyone else became colleagues that I made no further effort to get to know.
I was benchmarking the level of coolness (Coolness is even more cringe than coolest, I know) of those around me with their ability to understand American sarcasm — what a delusional thing to do.
Years came and went, and my perspective on the matter changed dramatically. I no longer believe that the best version of yourself is as American as possible. Or that the most refined people are those with the same western influences I tried so hard to reflect. I understand that I was deeply influenced by American culture at a young age, and it made me feel distinguished in a way.
I reached a bit of balance when I started reading Arabic literature in my college years. It was shocking how little I knew about Arabic and specifically Egyptian literature at the time. And it made me more open to exploring a more Egyptian persona.
Even now, years later, I still watch those shows all the time, but I’ve learned to better discern what is or isn’t aligned with my core values. I’ve also diluted the mix with a bunch of Arabic, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, and Korean shows (Thank you, Netflix!).
While there is absolutely no harm in being exposed to other cultures — in fact it may be one of the best human experiences on this planet — there is harm in overwriting your own culture with one that isn’t yours at all. I have thankfully dropped my weird hybrid identity for a new one. A mom determined to make sure that my kid doesn’t judge people by the accent of their second language.
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