(Continued from Laugh in a second language.)

Another reason why Alex's version of "the language of English" didn't make me laugh, and only rarely made me smile (that's when it occurred to me to translate his verbs and nouns into equally inappropriate Russian analogs), is that I so got used to my friends and my own broken English. I learnt to screen out all language imperfections before they even get a chance to reach the level of consciousness. There are some interesting parallels with the language of comics. Joe Zabel in his entry Poser and Invisible Art notices a similar effect:

If you're telling somebody a story, you want them to be paying attention to the story. You don't want them thinking about the pimple on the end of your nose. You don't want them thinking about your appearance at all. For the purposes of telling the story, ideally you should be invisible to them.
...
In animated film and in comics, on the other hand, the style of the artists assert a greater presence; it's not on the fringe of our consciousness, it's a part of the thing itself. It's as if somebody dressed in a clown suit is telling you a story-- it's hard to ignore the red wig and the rubber nose.
...
In comics and cartoons, consistency and simplification tend to allow the artwork to become invisible. When drawings are consistent in how they depict the world, readers eventually stop noticing the handiwork of the artist. When the drawings are simplified, they have less distracting detail.

This is indeed what happened when I was reading Everything is illuminated. By the end of the book Alex's butchered English became invisible.

And when the language became invisible, another effect that this book shares with graphic novels emerged. Often comics are a perfect media for most horrendous stories, to which effect Art Spiegelman's Maus is the most famous example. "By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't", writes Scott McCloud in his "Understanding Comics". The language of Everything is illuminated, the part that is told by Alex, to be precise, is simplified. This is a real effect -- the author didn't make it up -- I often noticed that my friends have a set of favorite words they use whenever they can't think of a more precise alternative. (It took longer to notice that I do the same.) Any idea, complex or not, has to be expressed via the same limited set of "primitives of meaning". In some ways such a finite (as opposed to "real", which bears the illusion of infinity) language is analogous to the visual language of graphic novels. By the end of the book, when I got used to the language, the story turned from a comedy of absurd into a tragedy, and this is when this reduced, value-deprived, "matter-of-fact", hopelessly inadequate language became the most expressive media, second only to silence.