england

My entire life I've never been able to really understand the British sense of humor. My friends used to be into the whole Monty Python craze, back when Monty Python was the world's answer to sophisticated humor; they'd force me to sit down and watch John Cleese and dead parrots, coughing up internal organs in their paroxysms of mirth. Me, I'd join in the hilarity with a few token guffaws, never really heartfelt, but anxious enough to be part of the crowd that I'd pass up the incidental boredom just to sound like I Got It.

At the time, I suspected it was my Japanese-ness that prohibited me from really understanding the deep humor of the entire Monty Python hysteria. Japanese humor tends to be of the direct sort -- witness my father's conviction that the Three Dunces were God's answer to depression -- or of a more lethal Machiavellian subtlety, in which people usually ends up dead as a punchline. Later on, forced by these same friends to watch a tedious hour of Saturday Night Live -- an incomprehensible hodge-podge of bad acting, uninspired scripting, and a flagrant dependence on teleprompters that somehow managed to survive two decades, and never mind the fact that my Cupid show with Jeremy Piven, hilarious, well-written, brilliantly acted only lasted a season -- I became convinced that the fault lay with the fact that my friends possessed poorly developed senses of humor. I pitied them.

Now that I'm older, I know for a fact that my friends never really understood Monty Python either, and that they were laughing just as guiltily as I was, thinking that they were the odd people out who just didn't Get It. It turns out that the true brilliance of Monty Python was that it was an entire cultural revolution brought about by the British exploitation of two simple American weaknesses: the guilty conviction that the British are superior to Americans; and a mortal terror of being thought stupid.

We got off the plane after an eleven hour flight from San Francisco to Heathrow, during which we established that the Guy had neglected to bring his best friend's phone number, and wasn't exactly positive that we would have a ride waiting for us at the airport. We were scheduled to have a two day layover, during which the Guy's best friend, father of a new, three-month old son, would be putting us up.

"Is he okay with that?" I asked, displaying an odd, belated bit of social conscience. "I mean, if his wife has a new baby, maybe she doesn't want to have to be a hostess."

"It'll be fine," the Guy said, with the comfortable assurance of a person who will never have to endure hours of agonizing labor to squirt out a fully formed human life. "She won't care."

Compared to the Guy, I'm a Goliath of social conscience. And I kicked puppies when I was young.

The Guy's friend was, thankfully, waiting for us at the airport. I dozed in the car ride back to his home, listening to their conversation with that half-inch of me that was actually conscious.

In two hours, I managed to establish a framework by which to assess British humor; a fairly reliable template by which to determine what topics will cause laughter in a pub.

• The Welsh.
  

• British politicians.
  

• Anything involving toilets or bowel movements.
  

• George "Dubya" Bush.
  

• Smelly cheese.
  

• Sheep.
  

• Anybody outside the immediate conversational circle.
  

We spent two days in the Guy's best friend's home, where we ate, chatted, and slept through the inevitable bout of jetlag. The new three-month old baby gave me a sidelong glance and smiled slyly, finding something privately amusing in my appearance. The Guy and the baby found each other equally fascinating, discovering intellectual equals in each other; the baby grinned happily at him for hours, willing to be hugely entertained by the Guy's very large nose and complete set of teeth, while the Guy absorbed himself in favorably comparing the baby's character with his godson's, three years older and reluctant to warm up to the strangers who had invaded his home.

"Can I trade?" the Guy asked his friend, the proud father. "This one seems a lot smarter than the one I'm godfather to."

I observed to the mother that the Guy was a bit of a prick. She laughed.

"You are," I told the Guy later, reproachfully. "You shouldn't say things like that."

"Why not? It's true," the Guy said, blankly. "My godson's whiny."

"I hope you never breed," I said bitterly, and went to play with the baby.

Despite only being three years old, bilingual, and inarticulate in both languages (English and Greek), the godson already had a distinctive British accent to his disjointed ramblings. "Wahnt to wahtch video," he insisted, marching up and down the corridor with his trouser waistband clutched firmly in both hands. He was Masterpiece Theatre with dentures and verbal dyslexia.

I've always found the British accent to be sexy. Actually, like most Americans, I've always found almost any accent of any kind to be sexy; having grown accustomed to the relative blandness of the American cant, there's something refreshingly sophisticated about the accents heard abroad: French, German, British, Irish. Listening to British men talk has always sent a little shiver up my spine, probably part of the reason I'm with the Guy, though six years in the United States and an unhealthy talent for mimicry has made his accent as bland and American as the next Joe. Hearing that same accent come out of the mouth of a three year old did something to disconnect the chain between my ears and the hairs on the back of my neck.

We fell asleep at two p.m. the first day, excusing ourselves from our hosts with promises that this would only be a nap, only to wake up at three in the morning in a household gone dead silent except for the occasional whimpers of the newborn in his parents' room.

We crept downstairs, I with my book, the Guy with his Gameboy, and huddled in front of the television to watch BBC news and a bizarre set of cartoons about a falsetto fly and his great insectoid adventures. The British interviewed for a talk show were nearly incomprehensible, their accents were so thick; it was like listening to a language long forgotten: the vowels were rounded right, the consonants were formed correctly, even the pattern was familiar, but none of it came from a vocabulary I'd ever learned.

"What the hell did she just say?"

"I wasn't listening."

"How do they understand each other? How do you understand them? I mean, do you ever listen to one of your people and just say, 'Huh'?"

"All the time . . . what do you mean, one of my people?"

"I swear this guy is about to swallow his own tongue. Somebody stop him."

We head for Mauritius on the 25th.