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Wordplay and the Satirical Press
France has a long tradition of satirical journalism. The best-known title, Le Canard enchaîné, founded in 1915, comes out every Wednesday, carries no advertising, and is famous both for its investigative scoops and for its headlines, which are often built on puns, double meanings and twisted proverbs. It also publishes a weekly column of contrepèteries, spoonerisms with a hidden, usually risqué meaning, which readers enjoy decoding. Another satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, is known above all for its cartoons. Puns are everywhere in French public life, not only in satire: in newspaper headlines, shop names, advertising and political commentary. They rely heavily on the language's many homophones, words written differently but pronounced the same, such as ver, vert, verre and vers, and on a shared stock of idioms, proverbs, song lyrics and film lines that a writer can twist. This is why French wordplay is so often called untranslatable: a translator can explain a pun, or invent a different one, but rarely keep the same joke. For learners, understanding a punning headline is a good test of how deeply the language has been absorbed, since it requires hearing the original phrase under the new one.