Wherein Eddie Izzard becomes my hero all over again

As I've blogged before, I've been trying to figure out how Eddie Izzard translated his giraffes and tigers bit into French. Because it's based on charades, he can't just plug French words in, he'd have to find a whole new word to charade.

After wondering about this for years, I finally got my answer, thanks to "Claywoman" on Eddie's fan site (third post in the thread - I can't figure out how to make direct links):

The giraffes were there too but with twist because tiger doesn't work in French, it became a lion. "Lit" (pronounced lee) is French for bed and "on" is a French pronoun for we or they... different mimes but he still made it very funny.

This is particularly impressive because the tigers really should have been lions in English in the first place! Tigers live in Asia and giraffes live in Africa (hence Monty Python's "A tiger??? In Africa??"), but Eddie was using a tiger in the English-language charades because it's charadable in English. So this is not only an effective translation of comedy, an effective translation of the non-verbal, and an effective translation of the non-translatable, but it's one of those so very rare situations where the translation is an improvement upon the original!

Well done to you, Mr. Izzard! I'm quite genuinely impressed, and at the same time kicking myself for not having thought of it myself.