It’s comedy, Jim, but not as we know it. So surmises a French marquis returning to the court of Louis XIV after a trip to England in Patrice Leconte’s 1996 film Ridicule. “They have a form of conversation called humour, which makes everyone laugh a lot,” relates the bemused nobleman to his peers. Struggling to translate the foreign word, he at last gives up, concluding: “It’s not wit.”

It’s official then. The French don’t have a sense of humour. But before our francophone readers choke on their croissants (can’t they take a joke?), that's not to say that the French are unfunny. They just do things differently. Laughter included. And, unsurprisingly, their way of having a joke involves an emphasis on the rational and abstract, as well as class struggle.

The word “humour” (“humor” for Americans) is an Anglo-Norman invention. Before its revolution, the term was barely known in France. Paradoxically originating from the French “humeur,” or mood, the English word “humorist,”’ signifying an eccentric person (one who was “not in his humour”) came in the early 18th century to denote those who described such eccentricities. The Acadamie Française, an institution that ferociously polices the French language, only accepted the word humouristique in 1878, and humour in 1932.

In a 1711 issue of his review The Spectator, Joseph Addison explained the genesis of this new comedic style as the product of a marriage between “Wit” and “Gaiety,” the middle ground between aristocratic wit and popular farce. The works of the early humorist novelists Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne are anchored in the daily life and common sense of the expanding middle classes—the reading public for these books. English humour according to William Temple, a British politician and essayist writing in 1690, resulted from the liberty enjoyed by the population. The despotism practiced in Europe, in contrast, produced “a uniformity, with only two models: the nobility and the people.”

Whereas English humour entails an equanimous, detached and essentially middle-class mindset, the French excel at extremes of high and low comedy: rapier wit (esprit), and crude farce (bouffonnerie). Until the 19th century, popular comedy in France was chiefly the coarse “Gallic” humour of the latter. Scatological, misogynistic, and sexual jokes abounded. The French writer François Rabelais (1494-1553) is strongly associated with such humour, spawning the adjective, rabelesien, to describe any kind of exaggerated or earthy comedy. His most famous work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, recounts the adventures of a giant and his son with over-the-top satire, including long lists of crude insults.

In his recently published book, Loving Dictionary of France, French author Denis Tillinac celebrates the French ability to laugh out loud at anything, however crude or trivial, while “English humour, subtler than ours, lends itself more to a smile.” Even today, it is easier to tell a racy joke at a French dinner party than at an English one. Anglophones who can’t differentiate between the French “ou” and “u” sounds should be grateful for this appreciation of crude gags when they insist on thanking people with an enthusiastic “merci beau cul” (thank you nice arse).

Whilst coarse popular bouffonnerie provokes hearty guffaws, cutting esprit aims to wound and sound smart rather than amuse. Aristotle defined wit as “an educated insult.” Sharply opposed to the English tradition of humour, French wit is cruel rather than kind, exclusive rather than inclusive, and intellectual rather than nonsensical.

In an essay published in 1877, George Meredith, an English satirist, compared the context in which Molière wrote his plays—the court of Louis XIV—with the background of the English humorists: “He had that lively, quicksilver world of the animalcule passions, the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities… A simply bourgeois circle will not furnish it.”

As the aristocracy centralised around the urban court, increasingly refined etiquette outlawed the bawdy humour of the Renaissance, with its impolite reference to bodily functions. The court became a stage, and vicious wit the language of its performers.
In this context, verbal deftness was indispensable. This is implicit today in the number of French jokes about the Francophone Swiss—like the Belgians, the butt of many French gags—being slow talkers. “The French think to speak quickly is to be quick witted,” says Christie Davies, author of The Mirth of Nations. “I think in England we would say, ‘The wise man speaks in a measured way.’”

The repressive atmosphere of the court, and the censorship of printed works, necessitated a subtle ironic language. Such lexical dexterity concealed as it showed off. “Nothing is impossible to your Majesty,” replied French poet Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) when commenting on the Sun King’s verse. “You wanted to write bad poetry. You have perfectly succeeded.” Depending upon one’s reading of the French word “mauvais,” Boileau could have been congratulating the king on composing some wicked (morally bad) lines or insulting his artistically poor effort. This is a perfect example of that peculiarly French deadpan sarcasm known as second degree, or straight face irony, that often takes Anglophones aback.

“Wit,” says Don Nilsen, professor of English at the University of Arizona and executive secretary of the International Society of Humor Studies, “is a very public kind of language and way of sparring for supremacy.” While British humour entails an ability to mock oneself, to do so at court, with the ever-present threat of disgrace or exile, was politically dangerous. To appear ridiculous in this highly competitive atmosphere was the ultimate social gaffe. Voltaire once said: “God, make my enemies ridiculous!’ God has obliged me.”

“The self-consciously intellectual people in France take themselves away from jokes as a way of excluding the people who tell them,” argues Dr. Davies. “[Whereas], if you’re an intellectual in England, you don’t lose caste by using humour… there’s a sort of common world of joking.”

Even French comics, explains Mark Jane, an English performer with the Paris-based improvisational theatre group, The Improfessionals, “would like the audience to go away thinking they’re intelligent.” Describing Anglophone improvisation, he adds: “It’s about group work and telling stories, and it’s fun to fail on stage.” As anybody who has endured a French education will confirm, the idea that it is fun to fail is anathema to the French mindset. Perfection is the goal. “How many times have you heard a Frenchman say ‘I was wrong?’” laughs Mr. Jane.

According to Alain Woodrow, author of Et ça vous fait rire?, utter nonsense is mistrusted by the French: “Good Cartesians, they love reason and logic too much to tolerate nonsense.” French absurdists wanted to make a revolution; Monty Python just wanted to make people laugh. “In France, a joke must always have a start, a middle and an end. I can’t stand that,” once complained Antoine de Caunes, the French comedian who brought ribald Gallic humour to the British with the TV programme Eurotrash.

After the 1789 Revolution, with the nobility either dead or in exile, the atmosphere in France changed dramatically. Madame de Staël, an influential Swiss author living in Paris at the time, insisted that literature should renounce laughter. Only the aristocracy, she thought, had the “taste and decency” to unite joke telling with nice manners. “This grace at once imposing and slight cannot fit with republican mores: It is too distinctly characteristic of the habits of great fortune and an elevated position.”

She was proved right. Aristocratic wit, cynical and snobbish, became the last ditch elitism of an endangered class. Humour started being produced for a very different audience: “the people.” As writers dared express themselves openly, the new tradition of political satire evolved. Honoré Daumier, the most prominent 19th century French cartoonist, served six months in jail for depicting King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans as Rabelais’s gluttonous giant Gargantua.

The heyday of the French polemicist press followed, especially during the liberal Third Republic (1870-1914). The newspaper L’Assiette au beurre (1901-1912), dubbed an “anarchist firebrand,” criticised every imaginable target, from banks to colonialism. Le Canard enchaîné, a satirical weekly founded in 1915 and still a regular at French newsstands, encapsulates the committed character of French satire in its mix of cartoons and genuine investigative journalism.

“We still have the naivety to believe in certain things,” said France’s best-known political caricaturist, Jean Plantureux, or Plantu, whose cartoons have been featured on the front page of Le Monde every day since 1985. “We do not have the detachment that characterizes English humour, we are more militant. If we have a cause to protest, however minor, we tear open our shirts, run into the street and shout ‘Shoot me!’”

Lack of this detachment partly explains the French difficulty with self-deprecation. One of the few French comedians who succeeded in exorcising France’s problems in this way was Michel Colluci, known as Coluche. An overgrown man strapped in childish dungarees, curly hair springing out over his country bumpkin face, Coluche ruthlessly sent up the racist, chauvinist, and just plain obnoxious side of the French. Hugely popular, his death in a motorcycle accident in 1986 was national trauma.

Happily, a young generation of stand-up comics, such as the hilarious Djamel Debbouze, manage to make their countrymen laugh while mocking them. Debbouze, a comedian from the banlieue, starred in the 2002 Astérix film, Mission Cleopatra. By turning the Gauls vs. Roman theme into a satire of modern France, the film continued the critical tradition of French comic strips. Rambunctious and rude, the Astérix books are quintessentially French.

Yet, despite the difficulty of translating the countless puns—the French language, with its many homonyms, is particularly suited to wordplay—the books have been produced in 72 languages, five regional languages, and 18 dialects. The French may not have the temperate humour of the English, but, with their cruelty and crudeness, they know how to charm us all.