Day 31 - Common Culture
May. 29th, 2024 12:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bigmogDespite the rain yesterday, I managed to venture out and get lost in the non-touristy parts of the city. Just a few blocks from all the crowds are quiet places with reasonable prices. I'm not super price conscious in truth. This is paid time off after all and I can pinch pennies again back home. Euros are fairly simple to convert to dollars. Hungarian Forint, Polish Zloty, and Czeck Crowns, I don't even bother.
Last night I saw another stand-up comedy show in a cellar of a bar. This time the act was an American living in Britian. He has clearly honed his craft by performing for international crowds. In some places it's actually acceptable to heckle the comic a bit so they have to be great at crowd work. He didn't even do much of his scripted material. Still it was a great performance and I'm tempted to paraphrase some of his observations here.
He noted that Americans aren't stupid. We're just ignorant when it comes to the world. That's because whenever we get some culture imported, they tend to take off the edges so that Americans will accept it. On that, I will counter and offer that the same happens in reverse but perhaps to a lesser degree. American culture is valid too. It's funny to consider that, for example, Czech has centuries of history but technically America is an older country. (1776 vs 1993).
Last night I saw another stand-up comedy show in a cellar of a bar. This time the act was an American living in Britian. He has clearly honed his craft by performing for international crowds. In some places it's actually acceptable to heckle the comic a bit so they have to be great at crowd work. He didn't even do much of his scripted material. Still it was a great performance and I'm tempted to paraphrase some of his observations here.
He noted that Americans aren't stupid. We're just ignorant when it comes to the world. That's because whenever we get some culture imported, they tend to take off the edges so that Americans will accept it. On that, I will counter and offer that the same happens in reverse but perhaps to a lesser degree. American culture is valid too. It's funny to consider that, for example, Czech has centuries of history but technically America is an older country. (1776 vs 1993).