Does humour exist in France? Before the French revolution of 1789, the word humour was hardly known. People knew esprit (wit), farce (prank), bouffonnerie (drollery) and humeur (a state of mind, or mood), but not humour. Only in 1878 did the French Academy, the institution that stands guard over the French language, accept humoristique as a French word. A year later Edmond de Goncourt used humour without italics as a French word in his novel "Les Fr?res Zemganno", but not until 1932 did the academicians give their approval to the noun humour.

Writers and intellectuals musing about English humour searched for an equivalent in France. Fran?ois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, France's best-known writer in the 18th century, tells the Abbot d'Olivet in a letter in 1762 that the English pronounce humour yumor, and think they are the only ones to have a term to express that state of mind. Madame de Sta?l, the daughter of Jacques Necker, a finance minister of Louis XVI, wrote in a discourse on literature: "The English language created a word, humour, to express a hilarity, which is in the blood almost as much as in the mind ...What the English depict with great talent is bizarre characters, because they have lots of those amongst them."

One of the fiercest critics of the government, "Les Guignols de l'Info" ("The News Puppets"), a daily television programme similar to Britain's satirical "Spitting Image", is a huge success. "Les Guignols" has become sharper, even crueller, since it started in 1988. Hardly anything is taboo now. Supermenteur ("Superliar"), President Jacques Chirac's alter ego, is a particular favourite. ... "Les Guignols" has felt obliged to apologise only a few times--once to Mr Chirac's wife, Bernadette, whom it had portrayed masturbating with her handbag.

Le Canard encha?n?, a satirical weekly, is equally feared by politicians and public personalities because of its investigative journalism and trenchant wit. Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Brown of the Peanuts cartoon strip was godfather to the magazine) and Hara-kiri hebdo, two satirical weeklies launched in 1969, are competing on the same ground. Hara-Kiri, which was created in 1960 as a monthly French version of Mad, an American satirical magazine, was twice censored by the government before its relaunch as a weekly. It has absorbed La Grosse Bertha, another satirical magazine that was launched in 1991 during the first Gulf war. Charlie Hebdo went bust in 1981, just after supporting Coluche, a comedian, in his bid for the presidency. It was relaunched ten years later.

If the Latin emotions of the French sit uneasily with humour, so does the French logical mind. French children are instilled with Cartesian esprit (here meaning mind) at school and, even more, in the grandes ?coles, the country's elite universities. ... A French Cartesian mind does not know what to make of a nonsensical story, such as this one. "The governor of the Bank of England began an address to an assembly of bankers with these words: `There are three kinds of economists, those who can count and those who can't.'" A joke of this kind would be met with incomprehension by French listeners. It is not logical.

Self-deprecation, another essential ingredient of a "detached" sense of humour, is not the forte of the French. But if France is too emotional, too logical or too unsure of itself for humour, it can at least fall back on farce as a way of releasing the emotions. The French love Jerry Lewis, the American they call le roi du crazy; he has even been awarded the Legion of Honour, the country's highest decoration. And of course France produces its own farces. One of the best-loved of recent years is the at times heavy-handed film "Le P?re No?l est une Ordure" ("Father Christmas is a Shit"), directed by Jean-Marie Poir?. It shows Pierre and Th?r?se, staffers at a charity, manning the telephones on Christmas Eve to help callers in despair. Z?zette, a pregnant woman, arrives at the office, fleeing her violent husband, F?lix, who is close behind her. F?lix, still wearing his working clothes as Father Christmas, is subdued by Pierre and Th?r?se and ends up in hospital. The second visitor at the office is Katia, a manic-depressive transvestite in search of Mr or Miss Right. The ensuing series of catastrophes reaches its climax when F?lix returns with a gun, a lift repairman is killed, Pierre loses his virginity to Th?r?se, and F?lix and Z?zette dispose of the dead repairman.

Why do French comic films not travel well when those made in Britain or America - whether by Woody Allen, John Cleese or the Monty Python team - seem to make people laugh all over the world? One answer, perhaps, is that audiences in other countries simply do not have the French fondness of puerile farce. Another, though, may be that the things that make the French laugh involve linguistic somersaults that only work in their own language. Much of French humour is jeux des mots, untranslatable wordplays.