[LEAH TORRES: (I've Been Working on the Railroad sung in German)]

[ACTOR: Lesson number seven. He got down and dirty so I got down and dirty too. (Repeated in another language.) Now you try.]

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay, so this next story, this next translation story—or maybe it's a mistranslation story I don't know ...

[ACTOR: Now you try.]

JAD: Hey! This next story, actually we should say, it contains a lot of obscenities. A lot of obscenities coming up. A lot of strong, graphic language. If that's not something you're into or if you've got kids around, I would advise you to skip forward about nine-and-a-half minutes. All right, if you're still here?

ELLEN HORNE: Yeah. We're rolling.

JAD: This one comes from our executive producer, Ellen Horne.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Okay, so you should start the story, Ellen Horne.

JAD: Yay. So, how did—were you at this show? Like ...

ELLEN: Yeah. So you guys know Nick Nuciforo, who helped us arrange the tour for Radiolab?

JAD: Sure.

ELLEN: So he invited me to come to it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: All right, it's Oddball 2014!]

ELLEN: So it's the Oddball Comedy Festival. And when we got there, you know, there's, like, huge crowds.

JAD: Tens of thousands of people kind of crowds?

ELLEN: Like, 14,000 people.

JAD: Oh, my God.

ELLEN: Yeah. So we sat down, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: From the state of New Jersey the Roastmaster General Jeff Ross!]

ELLEN: Do you guys know Jeff Ross?

JAD: Uh-uh.

ROBERT: No.

ELLEN: He's an insult comedian. He gets up. He's the MC for the night. And he kicks the show off.

JEFF ROSS: How the hell are you Jersey? Yeah!

ELLEN: And ...

JEFF ROSS: How are you doing, sir?

ELLEN: He starts picking folks out of the crowd.

JEFF ROSS: What's your name? Rob? I loved you on To Catch a Predator.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JEFF ROSS: Look at these two chicks. How you doing, ladies? You look very cute. Two fives make a 10.

JAD: D'oh!

ELLEN: And then he looks to his left, and ...

JEFF ROSS: Hi! There's a lady doing sign language over there.

ELLEN: ... he sees the sign language interpreter.

JEFF ROSS: Can I come over there?

ELLEN: She looks like she's in her 50s. Brunette, glasses, wearing a tank top.

JEFF ROSS: What's your name? Kymme? Give it up for Kymme.

ELLEN: Stadium gives the polite clapping for Kymme.

JEFF ROSS: This is wild, Kymme.

ELLEN: And then he says ...

JEFF ROSS: So anyway, I was jerking off the other day ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

ELLEN: [laughs] And Kymme gives a, like ...

ROBERT: She has to—is she translating him?

ELLEN: Oh, yeah.

ROBERT: Oh, God!

ELLEN: She cups her hand and quickly moves it up and down in the air. Gets a big laugh. And so Jeff Ross seeing this, he escalates.

JEFF ROSS: Then I stuck my thumb in my nose just ‘cause I had a booger in there.

ELLEN: So to translate, she has to stick her thumb in her nose.

JEFF ROSS: And I decided to stick my pinkie in my own [bleep].

JAD: Oh!

ELLEN: Oh! Kymme does a few signs, and then makes it look like she's sticking her hand in her butt. Crowd goes wild.

JEFF ROSS: We're gonna have a lot of fun tonight, Kymme.

ELLEN: So Jeff Ross takes it even further.

JEFF ROSS: And afterwards I’m gonna get out my vibrator with a hand crank and give it to you old school-style.

ELLEN: So now she has to do signs for, like, a vibrator hand crank.

JEFF ROSS: I was squeezing my [bleep] this morning for, like, a half an hour. And it felt so good!

ELLEN: And she is having to, like, rub her own boobs.

JAD: I'm troubled by how funny this is. 

JEFF ROSS: I love you, Kymme. 

ELLEN: Well, yeah. Because here's the thing. Halfway through the show, I noticed that Kymme wasn't there anymore.

JAD: Hmm.

ELLEN: She didn't translate for Sarah Silverman, she didn't translate for ...

ROBERT: Did someone else? Or was there just no translation?

ELLEN: No. There's no translation.

JAD: Huh.

ELLEN: So it made me wonder. What did I see there? What was going on? Jeff Ross was clearly using her, but was Kymme okay with that?

ELLEN: Okay.

ELLEN: So I found a list of all the sign language translators in the state of New Jersey.

ELLEN: Hi.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: Hi. How are you?

ELLEN: I'm good. How are you?

ELLEN: And I found her.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: Okay, my name's Kymme Van Cleef, and I'm a certified American Sign Language interpreter. And we're here in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.

ELLEN: Turns out that Kymme lives part of the year, and—and she has her entire life in a religious community on the beach in New Jersey.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: When I'm not doing comedy, I'm doing religious sign language. I interpret the services, and I'm in the choir.

ELLEN: And there's this venue nearby that does these big stadium shows. If there's any deaf ticket buyers, the venue's required by law to provide a sign language interpreter.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: So PNC calls me. I do all their—their concerts, all the musical concerts, which I've been doing for years. You know, Goo Goo Dolls, whatever. But I always can prep up for them. I get the set list, I go to lyrics.com. I always—you know, because a lot of times I don't know the Goo Goo Dolls. I like Frank Sinatra and, you know, hip-hop. When he asked me to do comedy, I'm like, "There's no prep for that!" I didn't know what was coming at me. I had no idea who any of these comedians are. Of course, I went ...

ELLEN: Did you know any of the comedians?

KYMME VAN CLEEF: No, no.

ELLEN: Eventually I ask her about the whole Jeff Ross thing.

ELLEN: So he's basically having you harass yourself.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: Yes.

ELLEN: And I am most curious to sort of find you and follow up and just find out, like, how that felt.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: Well ...

ELLEN: And she says the moment Jeff Ross started getting raunchy, she had a choice.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: There's—there's registers in sign language.

JAD: Registers?

ELLEN: Yeah. You can be formal, you can be casual, or you can be intimate.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: And you can pick signs from all of those registers.

ELLEN: Like, take for example the word [bleep].

JAD: Mm-hmm.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: Now the polite way to do it would be to maybe spell it.

ELLEN: So F-U-C-K. Or ...

KYMME VAN CLEEF: You know, there's the regular gesture.

ELLEN: You could do this.

ROBERT: So you're giving us the finger.

JAD: Two middle fingers, yeah.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: You know, there's quite a few.

ELLEN: She was just getting started.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: And then there's this one that actually shows people doing the action.

ELLEN: She takes out two fingers on each hand and smashes them together.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: There's the—you know, this way, which is even more graphic.

ELLEN: Arms out and just pelvic thrusts.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Receiving the physical act.

ELLEN: So she had a lot of options. But with Jeff Ross, she figured that what was necessary was this kind of intimate, graphic tone.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: He was down and dirty. I was down and dirty.

ELLEN: So you didn't have any discomfort with any of that? Or a little?

KYMME VAN CLEEF: No, I was having such a good time. I really—I really was enjoying it.

ROBERT: So then why do you think she left?

ELLEN: So this never occurred to me. She was there for one girl. One deaf girl.

ROBERT: What? What do you mean?

ELLEN: So there's 14,000 people there, but one ticket buyer was deaf and asked for a sign language interpreter.

JAD: Just one?

ELLEN: Yeah. A young girl who was there with her mom.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: Did she know where this client was?

ELLEN: Yeah. Oh, yeah. She was in that position on the stage because she was near where the client was. And so the whole time she's signing towards the client and seeing her reaction.

ELLEN: Can you describe what your client was doing?

KYMME VAN CLEEF: She was like, "Oh!"

ELLEN: Oh, so I see you're holding your hand over your—over your eyes.

ELLEN: She said the client—it was like a whole body cringe.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: Because I think she thought she was getting a lot of attention.

ELLEN: Like, the client was mortified. And ...

KYMME VAN CLEEF: At intermission, my client ...

ELLEN: Signed back to her. "We're gonna take off."

KYMME VAN CLEEF: "We're gonna go home now." So I'm like, "Okay."

JAD: So Kymme left because the client left?

ELLEN: Yeah.

JAD: Did you manage to talk to this girl?

ELLEN: No. I've emailed her, I got the venue to call her, but she hasn't gotten back to me.

JAD: Huh. I'm suddenly feeling bad for this girl. I mean, it feels somehow like she got a raw deal, you know?

ROBERT: Would you, Jad—if you had been her, if you'd been Kymme, would you have, do you think, just enjoyed yourself a little less? Been little else graphic and been a little less—playing with the comedian?

JAD: I think I would have dialed it down. Knowing me?

ELLEN: Oh my God, yeah. You would have dialed it down.

ROBERT: He's a good man, Jad Abumrad.

JAD: No, but it's actually ...

ROBERT: Terrible translator.

JAD: No, wait. Why would that make me a terrible translator? I mean, this is one girl in a crowd of 14,000, and the translator's there for her, not the 14,000.

ROBERT: No, but remember. Think about what the job is. She came to a comedy show.

ELLEN: But in—was there in any way in which Kymme had an obligation to represent the client?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: I think ...

ELLEN: She's in the middle between the two.

JAD: I think that that's—I think it's a fair question. I think it's a fair question. I mean, she's not just there to represent Jeff—Jeff on stage.

ROBERT: Yes she is!

JAD: No, she's there to—to be a mutual representative of both people.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: Why not?

ROBERT: She's at a comedy show, She's in the show. She's translating the show from the stage.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: You match the tone of the person.

ELLEN: That's what Kymme said.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: And if they're yelling and screaming, your signs are bigger, your face is exaggerated. You know, I made it clear, the tone that he was projecting.

ELLEN: But I asked her like, do you feel bad at all? Did you—do you feel like you lost sight of her and you started translating for the whole crowd? Did it feel like you went behind enemy lines at all? She just said no.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: If the whole audience was deaf, I would have done the same thing.

JAD: Huh.

ELLEN: "I was doing my job."

ROBERT: Yes. Because that's what a translator does. A translator is making what is happening up there available to me, not creating a middle space.

JAD: Hmm. And I guess you could argue that if she had made the choice to finger-spell so that she protected the girl, you could see that, from her perspective, as betraying the client because she's not giving her the full experience.

ELLEN: But it's weird because in her making the equal experience and her doing that, she makes it an experience that the girl doesn't want to have.

JAD: Yeah.

KYMME VAN CLEEF: Well ...

ELLEN: Although Kymme did tell me she could have taken it way farther, for sure. 

KYMME VAN CLEEF:  I did not do the intimate. Oh no, I did not.

ELLEN: The intimate register?

KYMME VAN CLEEF: No, I did not go there. I did it casual. Yeah, casual.

[KIRAN AHLUWALIA: (Three Blind Mice sung in Hindi)]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.