Watching movies in a foreign language is a take it or leave it kind of thing for a lot of people. Not everyone likes to read subtitles and others find dubbing disconcerting. I don’t mind either. Although I distinctly remember the time Robert Redford sounded as if the river that ran through it was the Seine.
Door number 19 is a hoot.
December 19, 2025
When I was a kid, one of my favorite party games was telephone. If you’ve never played, someone thinks of a phrase and whispers it to the person next to them and so on until it reaches the last person in the group. It’s fun to watch the confused looks as the message begins to change with each iteration. Finally, the last person announces what he has heard. It’s usually not even close to the original phrase. The more mangled the phrase, the more fun it is. While studying French, I realized that translation has the potential to become a game of telephone.
My brother, John, and I experienced this phenomenon back in the 80s. He was studying chemistry as a postdoctoral researcher on a Fulbright Scholarship in Zurich, Switzerland. Being the generous big brother that he was, he enrolled me in a French language program in Fribourg where he had become fluent in German the summer before. It was the experience of a lifetime for me, but when we’d reminisce about it, one particular memory always got us laughing.
During one of my weekend visits to Zurich, Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different was playing at the theater near John’s apartment. It was shown in its original English with French and German subtitles. We were both big Python fans and it was fun to watch a film that wasn’t dubbed. Mostly because John spoke German and I spoke French which meant one of us would have to whisper the plot to the other. Let’s just say, we’d done that and it wasn’t ideal.
We arrived at the theater early and bought our snacks. It was a small auditorium and there weren’t too many people there yet. We had our choice of seats and sat in the middle. Eventually, the room filled, the lights dimmed, and the movie began. As it went from sketch to sketch, John and I were laughing almost nonstop. The people in front of us kept turning in their seats to look at us. We thought we were laughing too loud. We tried to stifle it. That only made it worse. We looked behind us to find those patrons were also looking at us. Some were laughing, but we could tell they were laughing at us. How was it that we were the only two people in the theater to find this movie funny?
Then light dawned. We read the subtitles. John read the German, and I read the French. Turns out the translations were literal. “If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” translated in each language to “If I told you you had a beautiful body, would you be offended?” Every pun, quip, and punchline was translated verbatim, with no nuance or attempt to find a humorous equivalent. If you had to read this movie, it was deadly boring. The only hearty laughter elicited from all in attendance came from the physical comedy sketches.
Outside, after the film, my brother and I were approached by some of our fellow moviegoers. They obviously knew the subtitles were faulty and wanted to know what they missed. We explained some of the funnier jokes to our new friends. And then we asked them why they stayed for the whole film when it obviously wasn’t enjoyable for them. One couple said we were funnier than the movie. Apparently, we would poke each other as a good joke was coming and then our laughter was hilarious in and of itself. It was clear we had the script memorized. A woman told us that she enjoyed watching us enjoy ourselves. In spite of our antics, they all said they preferred English language movies that were dubbed. Completely understandable.
John and I had a lot of fun together that summer. We hiked in the Alps and Jura mountains. We spent a weekend on the Riviera. We traipsed through a botanical garden in Germany. But the most remarkable thing we did was to be the only two people in a movie theater to find Monty Python funny. And we kept laughing about it for years.
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