This week, I am plowing through Michel Tremblay's 1200-page "Les Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal", and I only manage to peel my eyeballs off those pages to draw this.

Wit and comedy is often lost through translation but the québecois translation of The Simpsons is one of those that become works of art in their own right.

Coming back to that brick I'm reading: Michel Tremblay is known for being the first writer to use working-class slang to tell the stories of working-class quebec families instead of trying to emulate the distant epics of 19th century France, where even poverty is seen as grand through the eye of the bourgeoisie. That was in 1968 and it made our live, our struggles, our cities, ourselves beautiful.
When it came to TV, we had one french dub of every movie: the one made in France with slang we don't even understand. Even now that there is a version dubbed in Quebec, the voice actors still try to emulate international french. The first two TV shows who broke the iron rule of the bland, one-size-fits-all international French were The Flintstones and The Simpsons...

...and that made them more relatable than anything dubbed for Canada before!

No grand, impossible love. No grandiose death. No grandiose anything. Homer Simpson, with all his working class banality made of fast food, a dead end job with a greedy boss, stupidity, alcoholism and feuds with Marge and out of control children is a character that could have been written by Tremblay himself!

There is something deeply north american about the all-american, beautiful mediocrity of Homer Simpson that you can understand from Quebec and Acadie, but not from grandiose Europe.