A small cottage industry of Paris comedy shows in English helps tourists laugh at themselves and Parisians both.
How archaic to think of women traveling to Paris getting a new bouffant hairdo and Chanel suit in order to fit in.Long gone are the days when an American in Paris had to fret that their travel trousseau, accent or sneakers would elicit sneers from sophisticated Parisians in the City of Lights.Everyone now wears running shoes, speaks English and waiters are more likely than not to especially love serving Americans, who, as a rule, can never think of tipping as arbitrary.
Then again, it takes only one supercilious waiter with a bad attitude to re-awaken the stereotypes of Parisians, positive or negative.Or, it takes just one especially loud fellow tourist on one of the impossibly long queues for the Louvre or Musée d'Orsay to awaken your self-consciousness with a vengeance.Are we all like that?, you wonder.
You gotta laugh.Indeed, there is a small cottage industry of Paris comedy shows in English that help you do just that.Comedienne Julie Collas and comic Olivier Giraud in their respective shows— Oh My God She's a Parisian and How to Become a Parisian in One Hour— plumb the seemingly bottomless fodder of culture collisions in their Paris midst.
Giraud's show is shaped as an instructional primer on daily tasks like taking the Metro, and more niche knowledge like how a woman should shave her public hair to please a Parisian man.Collas' show is no less instructional but presented more through creating an oversized persona of the harried Paris Mom you are expecting at any moment to quip à la Henny Youngman "…Take my children… please."
Both of these whip smart comics have the advantage of having lived and worked extensively in the United States — Giraud in the Miami hospitality industry and Collas as a New York lawyer.They hold court in two different but equally cozy theaters.Both draw a widely diverse tourist crowd that seems to include people from every continent. The shows are entirely in English.A healthy chunk of the crowd is even French— though more likely to hail from the provinces than Paris per se.
If you've learned in life that laughing at yourself is a powerful survival tool, make a note to see both shows during your Olympics sojourn, or whenever you click the City of Lights off your bucket list.
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