A Catalog of City Life
Robert Frost’s dictum “Poetry is what gets lost in translation” could as easily be applied to comedy. How else can you explain those inexplicably flat cartoons in Paris Match? Man runs out of gas; man takes out gas can; man walks for a long time along the road; man finds gas station closed. (Please, stop, you’re killing me!) Or the annoying broad humor of Japanese comic books, in which no moment is so serious or exciting as to prohibit a fart joke? Or two? Something got lost in translation.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Which is why the work of Japa-nese comedian Issey Ogata is so intriguing. At first glance it wouldn’t seem that Ogata–born in Fukuoka, raised in Tokyo, and not especially fluent in English–is the kind of performer who’d appeal to a non-Japanese audience. In addition, much of his Catalog of City Life is spent caricaturing such figures from Japanese culture as the mortally frantic overworked businessman and the housebound housewife. But even though I was a non-Japanese member of an audience full of people fluent in Japanese, I never had the sense I was missing Ogata’s humor. True, you do need to know a little Japanese–or wear some of those handy little simultaneous-translation headphones like the ones I was given for this show–to understand some of his material. But he tends to use language sparingly, and then mostly to set up the bits.
The one exception to Ogata’s translatability is the sketch “Folk Singer Forever,” a series of parodic folk songs–not surprising since song lyrics, like poetry, invite a level of wordplay that doesn’t carry easily from one language to another. Judging by the appreciative laughter Ogata inspired, his songs must have been much funnier in the original Japanese than in the rather flat English supplied by simultaneous translator M. Hart Larrabee IV: “Give me some money / Just a little would be fine.” Clearly you had to be there, and to be there you had to know not only Japanese but Japanese culture.
