I’ve been traveling the world doing stand-up for years, and my comedy is often about the cultural differences between places—and I recently realized that this probably all stems from a trip my family took to Europe when I was 8. I’m the youngest of six kids, and in 1974, for reasons none of us understood, my parents abruptly decided to take all of us, plus our aunt, on a huge trip to Europe, meaning Denmark, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Greece… I don’t even know where else. It was such an eye-opener that I never really got over it.
When you’re that tiny, you barely understand your own culture, which in my case was a Midwest where ethnic dining meant going to an Italian restaurant and ordering the ziti instead of spaghetti. But from our very first day, which was in Scotland, I remember feeling that everything was just so strange. Like, seeing Greyfriars Bobby, which is this big statue of a dog in an ancient graveyard in Edinburgh, and thinking, A dog? In a graveyard? Why? And every morning getting to have hot chocolate with breakfast, which to me was a dream.
I have all of these incredible memories that are so vivid and that ended up being these direction signs. It showed me, at a crucial moment, that this is a big world, and there’s a lot of different people with different points of view, and that even similarities can be deceiving.
At one point, we were in Copenhagen, visiting Tivoli Gardens, and I was doing that little-kid thing where you trail along behind everyone else in your own little world. In this case, I was totally obsessed with this hot dog my parents had purchased me, which had mustard and these amazing dried onions and was so delicious, and I was enjoying it intensely as I followed this line of blond people in cardigans. At a certain point, my parents turned around to look at me … and they weren’t my parents. And I looked around and realized that everyone was blond and had on a cardigan.
From there, my memory flashes to a store on the Greek isle of Rhodes, where my teenage sister had found a T-shirt she liked, and the store clerk—this woman in her 60s—said, “You should try it on,” and before my sister could ask about a changing room, the clerk literally grabbed my sister’s T-shirt, ripped it off her, and put the other T-shirt on her, while my sister just stood there stunned. I remember thinking, Wow, they really do things differently here! A bit later, on a sort of low-budget cruise ship in the Mediterranean, I saw someone wearing a thong for the first time—and I mean a man. A man who was cutting a woman’s hair, right there on the deck of this boat. You have to understand, the thong didn’t really make it to America until maybe the 1980s, so as an 8-year-old I was like, This is insane!
Every experience I had was flavored by this awareness of cultural difference. At some point, someone had a birthday celebration where no one sang “Happy Birthday” or even said “Happy Birthday.” Or, it’s Fourth of July, and I’m like, Hmm, I bet they wouldn’t do Fourth of July. I just loved thinking about that.
Much later, when I was 30, I got a commercial gig that shot in London. I went over there with two other Americans, and one woman with us was complaining the entire time—like, “Oh my God, the food’s so weird here, it’s awful,” and I thought, How could you complain? Isn’t it kind of interesting that it’s different? It made me think of that first trip, when we visited an Italian winery, and I was really thirsty and asked for a water, and they gave us sparkling water.
To a thirsty 8-year-old, that was the equivalent of thinking you’re biting into a Hershey’s bar and having it be baking chocolate. The great irony now is that this is all I drink, so maybe it was like a gateway drug. Maybe the whole trip was.
Actor and comedian Jim Gaffigan is performing two shows at this month’s Netflix Is a Joke Fest in Los Angeles. You can also catch him on his national Barely Alive Tour and in the new films Greedy People and Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.
