When you don't understand the reference
Immigrants may not get pop-culture references, but third culture kids are lost everywhere
“Lisa it’s your birthday! Happy birthday, Lisa.”
“I was saying boo-urns.”
“I’m gonna get me an edumacation.”
“Strike a pose!”
“No soup for you!”
“How you doin’?”
In grade school, the kids would make references I didn’t understand all the time. My default was to look at the cues of my other classmates. Laughing? I would laugh along. Sometimes I would laugh harder and louder than anyone else, just so everyone was sure I really got it. Rolling their eyes? Ugh, me too! So annoying what Jason/Mike/Jessie was saying.
In the 90s, asking what something meant was a sign of not-with-it-ness, and not-with-it is the opposite of what a child wants to be. My solution to this predicament was no solution at all: I just hoped really hard that I’d stumble onto the perfect rerun while flipping through channels after dinner, and finally be in on the joke like everyone else.
While my classmates watched Friends, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons, I watched reruns of Get Smart with my father. It was a 1960s show about a bumbling secret agent who somehow always saved the day. We loved everything about it — the slapstick humour, the flustered chief of the agency, the running gags repeated episode after episode. But while we laughed about Get Smart at home, no one at school would laugh if I repeated a line. I was making jokes that were 3 decades off, so I made them in my head, for an audience of one.
I was in 3rd year university when I realized that many of the childhood references that had gone over my head were from The Simpsons. In that moment, It occured to me that I could now look up these disembodied phrases to give them context. I fed Yahoo and Google my snatches of sentences, and out came links to forums and articles, a door to a culture from which I had stood apart, there for me to study. Pre-streaming, I couldn’t simply watch the episodes I’d missed, but the early internet was full of whole transcripts of everything. I could often read the scene in question line for line, creating this alternate reality where I knew it better than anyone, but still didn’t know it at all. What was the tone of Smithers’s voice when he said he was saying Boo-urns? What did Smithers even sound like? I had watched so little Simpsons that I had barely ever seen him on screen. Meme culture had not yet taken off, but here I was, a meme of those who had mimicked others in front of me, the girl who had finally gotten the joke long after everyone else has stopped laughing.