(I’d place the last word of the title in quotation marks, but they’d get escaped, causing the title to look silly.) Recently, Francois Hollande, the French president who looks like a Mickey Mouse (not Victor Ponta, the real, trademarked one), allowed the press to take photos of him and his lover. I suspect the show is put on so that the French people can convince themselves that they still have a heterosexual president. "Is his lover a woman? Are you sure? Well, then we can keep drinking wine, eating cheese and live long!" Meanwhile, I'm annoyed as hell that a friend of mine won't (or pretends she does not) get my jokes.

I have tried here, on this blog, to shine some light on my style, starting with “style & π-style” and ending with flirting. I sometimes even fall into a progressive regression. To summarize, I’m a bit geeky in the way I treat information (it’s like a drug to me) and I often flirt for the sake of flirting, without necessarily wanting to “close the deal”, even when the gate ends up oiled up and wide open. (I often find myself wishing that most women would also prefer flirting for the sake of flirting more and would not be so universally upset when things don’t progress beyond some laughs.)

My sense of humour is not exactly straightforward. I like jokes that require a bit of mental effort to get. Often, after telling one, I watch people’s faces tensing up in an effort, followed by the relaxation of “I get it”. Still, I like it like dat.

The problem with my long distance friend is that jokes such as the one with wohannis (the image is clickable), though easy to get, are very unsatisfying to me.

The joke, shown in the capture above, if not immediately apparent, should reveal itself by consulting the links in the Sources. It all started with the following cartoon published in 1957 in The New Yorker:

It followed with a t-shirt craze in the 80s with aliens with the capture “take me to your leader”, parodied in the 90s with t-shirts with “take me to your dealer”. My joke is, obviously, on the parody. To the “welcome to this new land, whatsappia”, I could’ve replied with the stock joke “take me to your dealer” but that would’ve been too unimaginative and unsurprising. I find surprises, and generally the unexpected funny, and when somebody makes a “stock joke”, though I may be laughing, I do so rather forced. Parodying the parody, with a “British-like” over-polite and somewhat confused banter is way funnier to me than what would otherwise be expected.

The problem I’m facing is that my friend does not seem to like my jokes – I don’t think she doesn’t get them, she’d just prefer them simpler, and this is not the first time. In fact, we’re talking now far less than we used to because jokes so often devolve into “I don’t get that” or “this makes no sense. ” Yet I prefer to be able to talk to someone without having to simplify my jokes – usually, the higher I hold that person, the more I expect in terms of [shared] sense of humour.

When I arrived in Canada, I faced a similar culture barrier. My jokes came from a different cultural background. I had not watched “Degrassi High” or 90210 Beverly Hills or all the other TV shows kids were drugged with from an early age. The jokes kids my age made were rather cryptic to me. For a while, I couldn’t tell if my jokes seemed to the other kids too “high-browed”, they lacked the cultural background to get them, or there was a problem with the delivery. Often times I could tell that they were trying to get them but failed, and other times were laughing even though they didn’t get it. That contributed to a sense of isolation. Eventually, I was able to make jokes that more people understood, but to get there, I had to subject myself to painful TV watching, looking up cultural references and adopting a sense of humour I had not really enjoyed.

A similar problem arises when dating across geographical barriers. Our cultural backgrounds are still not sufficiently intersecting, despite a century of American cultural domination and European Americanophilia.  Yet these days, we have Wikipedia and Google. It’s really hard to tell, when somebody doesn’t get your jokes: are they rejecting your friendship, or they simply don’t feel like looking up jokes? Do they feel more lost and confused because of not being able to read your face and the lack of physiognomic/emotional context, or they feel the same when face to face but then they’re simply more polite?

Should I keep trying?

LE: See reactions and more on WhatsApp.

Sources / More info: whatsapp, wiki-leader, ud-dealer, tumblr-dealer