About the blogger
Graciela is a producer at 成人快手 Learning English. She is not a native speaker of English and wonders how well you have to know the language to be able to understand humour.
Is it funny?
Hello.
Get this: "I'm good friends with 25 letters of the alphabet... I don't know Y."
Are you laughing? This joke can put a smile on my face now, but humour in English was lost on me when I arrived in Britain for the first time. I was confident I would be able to communicate easily with the locals. Why wouldn't I? I'd been to an English course accredited by the British Council in my native Brazil. I was a good student and could even understand movie plots without subtitles. And I had that touch of arrogance you find in every teenager.
I love old Monty Python sketches. This is a British group whose influence on comedy has been compared to The Beatles' influence on music.
How wrong I was! People in the streets of London are happy to give directions to a lost tourist but they just haven't got the time to assess every foreigner's level of English. I had to be more humble and accept that "Tarzan-English" is OK if you are learning.
I came back a couple of years later to further my studies and got a permit to work part-time. Well, my English was good enough for a brief spell at waitressing: "Take a seat, Sir", "What would you like for dessert?", "I'll bring your bill in a minute". By then I'd learnt that accents can be a problem. I remember asking a friendly customer what country he was from... He said "Manchester!" and laughter filled the air. The place was full of Londoners who sympathised with me in finding it difficult to fully understand a British person from the North.
Getting a joke without having to translate it in your head is a great achievement, I think. Even one as simple as that initial joke.
Do you understand that joke by Chris Turner, which was shortlisted on the Edinburgh Fringe festival? How about trying it again: "I'm good friends with 25 letters of the alphabet... I don't know Y."
Why is it funny?
Vocabulary
- accredited
officially approved
- plots
stories
- subtitles
words at the bottom of the screen with the translation of what is said in a movie
- arrogance
feeling that you know more than others
- humble
conscious of own failings
- Tarzan-English
a reference to the simplicity of language of the character brought up in the jungle
- a brief spell
a short period of time
- accents
pronunciation used by a particular group of people, which might be marked by different stress on syllables
- sympathised
shared an understanding of the other person's feelings
- getting
understanding
