#1 - Silly & Goofy

 Maybe it's cheating to start out with two words, but they're so similar that I couldn't really do one without the other!  I'm rather fond of both these words--there are numerous black-mail-worthy home videos of me making absurd faces and sounds at the camera while my parents laugh and say "What a silly girl!"  In fact, my entire childhood sense of humor really could not be described as anything but "silly" or "goofy."   And I think these are important aspects of anglophone humor in general--I mean, what about this guy?

 

And in the movie Inside Out, one of the five main islands that form the basis of Riley's whole personality was Goofball Island!  Seriously, how many of us can honestly say that we never ran around the house with underwear on our head when we were this age?

 

So why is there no word for this in French?!

Granted there are multiple definitions for these words in English and some of them translate into French.  Merriam Webster online defines "silly" as follows:

: having or showing a lack of thought, understanding, or good judgment : foolish or stupid
: not practical or sensible

: not serious, meaningful, or important

And "goofy:"

:  being crazy, ridiculous, or mildly ludicrous :  silly

(I find it interesting, by the way, that the definition for "goofy" mentions silly as a synonym, but the definition for "silly" seems to omit the humorous aspect of it entirely.  I've seen this in other dictionaries too.  Perhaps dictionary makers have never seen Monty Python?  But that's a side note.)

When struggling to describe the concept of "silly" humor to French people, I've been offered words like bête, stupide, sot, débile, which all basically mean "stupid."  Yes, those correspond to some usages of the word silly, but there's no humor in these.  Even in the French release of Inside Out, Goofball Island is translated as "l'île de l'Imbécillité"--the Island of Imbecility.   Every definition I've found of imbécillité is more-or-less as follows: weakness of mind, foolishness.  Not quite the same thing....

Some searches for a French equivalent of "goofy" gave me the word toqué, which means nutty or eccentric.  There's also the wonderful word, loufoque, which means crazy, zany, or over-the-top.  It's not too far off, but it's not the same either. 

Other French words that come close, but not quite, are absurde and ridicule, but they're pretty much exactly same thing as their English equivalents: absurd and ridiculous. 

And the French have a whole bunch of different words for funny: drôle, rigolo, marrant....  But none of that really sums up this concept of comedy that is nonsensical, spontaneous, not particularly articulate, but still really funny.  Eventually, I gave up trying to actually explain the words silly or goofy to French people--instead I simply tell them, "You know Monty Python?  It's like that."