The Key to Multilingualism Lies in the Ears, Not the Mouth
Steve Martin’s favorite comic moment of his entire career is the “hamburger” scene from The Pink Panther (2006), he once told People magazine. Martin plays Inspector Clouseau, who has an aggressively exaggerated French accent. In the scene, he is trying to learn how to say, “I would like to buy a hamburger,” with a dialect coach. “Dam-buergaaaaa,” he purrs at his coach, along with increasingly ridiculous permutations of all of the other words in the sentence. The scene is funny because it’s tru…