There are not many stand-up comedians who work in both English and Spanish, but this is the case of Carmen Lynch, who two decades ago started performing in venues in New York, growing and reaching the large American audience until and all on the legendary late television shows of David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon or Conan O’Brian, and that one day he wanted to try doing it in Spanish.
Lynch explains that she actually didn’t even intend to go into comedy, she wanted to be an actress, but while she was waiting for more roles to come her way, she tried it out, liked it and apparently did quite well . But what was the need to try another language? The daughter of an American soldier and a mother from Tortoise, she lived between the ages of 3 and 8 in Spain – first at the Rota base and then at the Torrejón de Ardoz base. And she more or less speaks the language: “At first I was a little embarrassed, but people kept telling me that my mistakes were funny, and now I feel more comfortable, even if I speak Spanish like an eight-year-old girl , and when I perform here I think they laugh at the jokes, but also at the way I speak”, he laughs.
As a child, she went to Tortosa every summer to see her grandparents – she understands a little Catalan, but speaks little – and now she comes to Barcelona to see her sister and nephews. It was so that one day, more than ten years ago, he discovered on Facebook that there were some places in the city where there were open mics in Spanish, in small bars, and he threw himself into it: “It was like an experiment and I was having a great time, and I started opening the show of a friend of mine from Madrid who took me to other places in Spain, ten or fifteen minutes, and every time I came here there were more, ha grown up a lot”.
“Now I do more and more performances in Spanish, also in New York, or in Miami, but they are Latin, not Spanish, and sometimes there are things I find difficult to translate”, he recalls. He also currently participates in the weekly podcast Podría ser peor with Venezuelan comedian and TV presenter Luis Chataing.
But you don’t need to change your language to change your sense of humor: “It’s not the same to perform in the north or the south of the USA, or in a city or a town, the way of being of the public can also change a lot because of age, and the truth is that the difference also makes it more fun, and also lets you see what works and what doesn’t.”
In the performances, Lynch combines the texts with an austere staging, with silences that could be uncomfortable, controlled pauses and very careful facial gestures. He likes to be laughed at jokes, but he is aware that sometimes open laughter is not everything. “It’s just that sometimes if they go there with their partner, they might think it’s not good to laugh about what…”.
Does she feel Spanish there and American here? “Today I feel half and half – and he says this in Catalan -. You can tell that I’m not from here, but I have many memories and a lot of affection, because there have been many summers and many Christmases”. In any case, he does not use the Catalan reality in his monologues: “They wouldn’t understand him there, when I act in Spanish in the United States, the majority of the audience is of Latin American origin. What they do know is that Catalan is spoken and when I say that my family lives in Barcelona there is always someone who says that they love the city”.
Yesterday he performed at the Cruïlla Comedy, sharing the stage with Bianca Kovacs, Marc Sarrats or Ignatius Farray, and from here nothing will return to the Barcelona stages, on the 15th at the Jamboree, in a double pass that will be recorded, to be released at the same time as the special he just recorded at the Comedy Cellar in New York. But there is a reason why he is particularly excited: “It is where my parents met”.
