Humor with a Ponent accent
LleidaDespite being a convinced atheist, I have a past where I went to catechism. This involved, to make matters worse, having to go to the twelve o'clock mass on some Sundays. The most intense and anticipated moments for the children (and not so much for the children) were when the music came into play. Especially on the most significant days, when acoustic guitars appeared. Without a doubt, the closest to Harlem gospel we could experience. Hallelujah!
There were those who sang. At home we had baptized them as the Montserrat Caballés and Lucianos Pavarottis of Pardinyes. And of course, one day the inevitable happened! At the first warbles (you can laugh at the Liceu), a sly look from my mother to my father triggered a Calvary of gasping breaths, spasms, teary eyes, tension, and facial redness. The performance was served. The procession was within. The kind of cockfight between sopranos and tenors was in crescendo, at the same pace that we bit our lips to contain our laughter. It didn't end like a miracle's rosary of dawn. A child's magical hum seemed to fall from the sky to release them. It was our salvation!
My resume of moments when I've peed myself laughing in both transgressive and ordinary places is of biblical proportions. Whoever is without sin, let him cast the first stone! However, as was made clear in the Garrick show by Tricicle a few years ago, not everyone laughs in the same way nor does a single type of humor exist. And it is that laughter is "intangible, unique to each being, it is unique" and it is part of our DNA.
We all experienced this firsthand on the evening of May 14th during the third edition of the unprecedented event La conya: stand-up comedy in Catalan with a Lleida accent, which has been hosted once a month at London Bar in Lleida since March 5th. It is the first open mic comedy project in the capital of Lleida, which was born, thanks to the Lleida-based monologists Rosa Monrous, Marc Oliva, and Roger Montagood, due to the existing void in this field. An initiative that also aims to be a kind of "humor laboratory so that participating comedians can know which jokes work and which don't." The third session featured well-known Lleida actors and actresses who ventured into this world for the first time, and they did so with flying colors, as well as other more experienced monologists. Between "casting calls to find a partner," "I saw it on my phone," and "monotonous lives that return spam calls," we burst out laughing. How much we needed it!
