The New York Public Library Podcast brings you the best of the Library's author talks, live events, and other bookish curiosities. In our most recent episode, we were lucky to be visited by Marjane Satrapi, the graphic novelist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author who brought us Persepolis. She spoke about the liabilities of learning English from American movies, ignorance, and the intelligence required for a sense of humor.
Satrapi, who was born in Iran and lives in France, began her Live at NYPL event by discussing some of the pitfalls of learning English through pop culture:
"English is not a language I have ever learned. It's not my first or second language at all... I learned English from American movies, so at the beginning when I was talking it, I was saying the word 'fuck' every second word... I was like, 'Hi, fuck!' Everybody in my life, I called them 'motherfucker.'"
This humorous storytelling is characteristic of Satrapi, and in fact, she considers humor to be indicative of intelligence. She elaborated:
"If you don't have any humor, you don't have any intelligence... because I mean if you don't understand that you are going to die and life is absolutely extremely difficult, it's just a succession of disillusion after disillusion and losing and losing and losing, and you take all of that for serious, then there is a problem for the brain."
Other problems for the brain the author mentioned included analyzing her own work and ignorance. Satrapi noted that ignorance is, unfortunately, often accompanied by certainty:
"The fact is that human beings function this way: the more ignorant he is and the more convinced he is, the less he knows and the more he's sure about what he knows. Which is absolutely natural... It becomes dangerous because they're ignorant. They have to be certain about something to situate themselves in the world."
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