Gad Elmaleh’s Translated Comedy

Most people prefer comfort to its alternative, but the cushy life isn’t for everyone. St. Francis renounced a fat inheritance to dress in rags and tend to lepers. David Blaine buried himself in a plastic coffin beneath a three-ton water tank on Sixty-eighth Street for a week. If you’re looking to push your own limits, you could take up free climbing or enter a hot-dog-eating contest. Or you might choose to quit your country and live, for an extended period of time, in a foreign language—a situation that tests strength not of limb or of constitution but of humility. Not understanding, and not being understood, is an endurance exercise all its own, a crash course in the art of serial self-mortification. Your personality, that familiar, nuanced, fluid thing—witty at a party, incisive in conversation, polite in a restaurant, obscene in a traffic jam—becomes about as fleet and flexible as a rusted hunk of scrap metal. You were used to being clever in your regular life? Cleverness is totally out of the question. You used to be funny? Good luck with that.