OZGWUG, Freedonia. Dieboldz Fleknez is well-known in this provincial city of 33,000 as a “card” and a “cut-up,” according to Mina Vlkstk, proprietor of a coffee and pastry shop. “He comes in, soon everyone is happy at his many old chestnuts,” she says in broken English as she rolls her eyes while wiping down a recently vacated table. “I have heard them so many times I bring myself to laugh only as matter of customer relations.”
“The coffee is almost as bitter as our waitress!”
But today, Fleknez is less outgoing than usual; he takes a seat with his back to the wall where he can view patrons coming in the entrance, and when he finally starts to crack a joke, he does so by leaning over to Okeip Nodorno with his hand cupped over his mouth in the manner of an American professional athlete trying to conceal his comments from opponents who may see them broadcast from long-range television cameras.
“Did you hear the one about the Freedonian mother-in-law?”
Fleknez is feeling the pinch of regulations barring national self-deprecation that went into effect today in this landlocked central European nation, which has struggled for many years to overcome the perception that it is backwards economically and socially. “Why do we put ourselves down so much?” says Assistant Minister of Culture Novtz Arriandzk. “That is the job of other countries’ smart-alecks, let us not ‘shoot ourselves in the gizzard.’”
Blessing of the Weird Metal Structures, Ozgwug.
He repeats a time-honored Freedonian joke to make his point, making clear that his re-telling is enclosed entirely by unseen quotation marks so that he is ‘mentioning’ the jape and not saying it himself. “‘Did you know that all Freedonians are ignorant serfs?’ says one Freedonian man to another,” he begins. “A second man replies ‘I do not understand your question.’”
Racial and ethnic self-deprecation is widespread, but varies in intensity among different peoples. “The French are the worst, they don’t ‘do’ self-deprecation and think their merdre doesn’t stink,” says Emil Nostrand, professor of linguistics at SUNY-Cazenovia. “Maybe they’ll start to find fault with themselves if the Freedonians invade and take them over.”
Freedonian woman puts “evil eye” on American blogger.
But that is unlikely to happen as long the people of this long-suffering nation score so low on self-esteem that special instruments are needed to detect it. “We were once a brave and proud people,” says Izkqo Vaiel-Bienzi, a retired army colonel. “Now, we would leave if the French told us to come back later, they were busy eating snails.”
I’d do well there! Well, I mean, as well as I’d do anywhere.