Learn English Through Laughter: Pro Comedy Tips

another lesson. Today we're going to do humor comprehension practice. Last lesson you learned about understanding, comprehending humor cross-culturally and particularly in American English. Today I'm going to throw a lot of examples to you, roughly about 10 examples, and I want you to comprehend them. I'm going to ask you questions and we're going to go over answers. We're going to discuss some of the issues and examples of why something is comprehended the way it is. We're also going to explore a little bit of explicit and implicit meaning, so stick around. All right, first things first, remember what we talked about last lesson. Identify what is funny to the audience. That is very important for being able to comprehend why something is funny. And remember, I was talking to you about how difficult it is to comprehend humor. It's because it is so contextualized that even people, like for me example, I understand some things and some things are funny to me that are not funny to somebody else somewhere else in America. So you have to remember that different people see different things as funny and it really is highly dependent upon their culture, their subculture, their history, the time period, whatever's happening in the time, all of that. And we're going to go into practicing that and discussing that as we practice today. Identify the context, very important. Identify the original audience. Know who it was originally designed for because if you understand them and you understand their context and their culture and why something like that would be funny to them, maybe you would begin to see the humor in it too. Identify elements that make it funny and identify why it was made. Sometimes some things that are made to make America laugh, for example, has been made at a specific time or over a specific issue or concept for a reason, for a purpose. We're gonna see some of that today too. Alright, I want to add two more types of humor because you are definitely ready for it. I'm gonna add parody, which is making fun of something by imitating it with deliberate exaggeration for comedic purposes. Alright, so we most often see this in the form of music but we also see it in other ways. So mainly, maybe you change the words of a song, right? You change the words of a song and you put out a goofy music video with it and just making fun of the song because you've changed the words into something else. Americans really love parody for that reason. Irony. Irony is fantastic for comedic relief, for comedic purposes. You have three types of irony that we're gonna focus on today. You have situational, which is a contradiction between what you expect and what actually happens. Then you have dramatic, which is something we know as the audience or the readers of a story. We know something that the characters do. We're gonna see an example of this today too. And then verbal irony. This is witty humor. It's like sarcasm, saying one thing but meaning another. You see this a lot in Big Bang Theory or other TV sitcoms like Friends. We are gonna see some of this as well but it's really important that you understand the differences in these and how these elements are used together with other genres of comedy to make people laugh. Alright so let's practice identifying some humor. Listen to this song by a Lone Star called Mr. Mom. It's pretty funny. Go ahead and listen to it and pull up the words if you're able to. If not, that's okay. This song is telling a story. The dad comes home. He has a bad day at work. He hears that he's getting fired, right? He's getting fired and he goes home to his wife and his wife says, it's okay honey, that's too bad. How about I go to work and you stay here with the kids for a bit until you find another job? And he's thinking, that sounds great. I'll just lay around and watch TV all day, play with the kids, cook whatever I want. That sounds awesome. Well we find from the from the song, like the first day that she goes to work, reality sets in and the difficulty of having kids and being the dad in the home with just the kids and how crazy her job is at home. The kids, the baby gets into things that he shouldn't, the crayons and the TV show that you see over and over and over again because the kids want to see, right? This is all part of the humor. So what kind of humor is this? This is situational humor. It's situational humor because the dad is at home while the wife goes to work and that is not the normal order at the time the song came out. Why is it funny? It's unexpected but it's relatable. Sometimes people have to do this and it's just one of those things that when somebody gets kids, the first thing that you have to get used to is having kids all the time, right? So moms and dads understand that. So it's really funny when his expectation was that he gets to lay around and lounge around all day, not have to go to work, have no expectations and it turns out it was much harder than he expected. Number three, what are the elements of humor? The traditional roles of man and woman, mom and dad being flipped and then for a dad to experience being alone with the kids for the first time seemingly in their marriage. So that that is pretty funny. All right, go ahead and watch this skit. It's a scene from a very common and famous TV show called Seinfeld back in the day. This was the one that everybody watched. It was the go-to before Friends. So go ahead and take a listen. Hey Jerry, I didn't know you liked soup. Hard to believe. This guy makes the best soup in the city, Jerry, the best. You know what they call him? Soup Nazi. I'm not letting you cut in line. Why not? Because if he catches us, we'll never be able to get soup again. Okay, okay. Medium turkey chili. Medium crab bisque. I didn't get any bread. Just forget it, let it go. Excuse me, I think you forgot my bread. Bread, two dollars extra. Two dollars? But everyone in front of me got free bread. You want bread? Yes, please. Three dollars. No soup for you. Oh, this is fantastic. How does he do it? You know, I don't see how you can sit there reading that and not even offer me any. I gave you a taste, what do you want? Why can't we share? I told you not to say anything. You can't go in there, brazenly flout the rules, then think I'm gonna share with you. Do you hear yourself? I'm sorry. This is what comes from living under a Nazi regime. Well, I gotta go back there and try again. Good afternoon. One large crab bisque to go. Red. Beautiful. You're pushing your luck, little man. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Hey there. Um, one malagatani and, um, what is that right there? Is that lima bean? Yes. I've never been a big fan. You know what? Has anyone ever told you you look exactly like Al Pacino? You know, a Sandoval woman. Very good. You know something? No soup for you. Come back. One year. One large jambalaya, please. So, continue. Well, my friend is awfully disappointed is all. Now, she's very emotional. Thank you. Jambalaya. You have been a good friend. I have a nine-one in my basement. If you want to pick it up, you're welcome to it. So, take it. It's yours. How can I possibly thank you? You are the only one who understands me. You suffer for your soup. Yes, that is right. You demand perfection from yourself, from your soup. How can I tolerate any less from my customer? Gazpacho, por favor. Por favor? Oh, I'm part Spanish. Adios, muchacho. Hi. Kramer gave me the armoire and it is so beautiful. I mean, I just can't tell you how much I appreciate it. You? If I knew it was for you, I never would have given it to him in the first place. I would have taken a hatchet and smashed it to pieces. Now, who wants soup? Next. Speak up. Hello. You think you can get soup? Please, you're wasting everyone's time. I don't want soup. I can make my own soup. Five cups, chopped porcini mushrooms, half a cup of olive oil, three pounds celery. That is my recipe for a wild mushroom. Yeah, that's right. I got them all. Cold cucumber, corn and crab chowder, malagatonic. Malagatonic? You're through, soup Nazi. No more soup for you. Okay, so what kind of humor was that? What elements are funny? Why was the cook called a soup Nazi? And how did the woman get her way in the end? This is a bit of surreal humor because it's ridiculous, right? This is not normal for a restaurant. You don't normally have a soup Nazi that everybody acts so rigid and scared of him and obeys in a certain way in order to get this soup. That is not normally what happens. So this is surreal. It's absurd. It's ridiculous. And the ridiculous elements of these people and her stubbornness and all of this. Why was the cook called a soup Nazi? Because he was rigid and strict. And if people did not act the way he wanted them to, they did not get soup. No soup for you, right? And how did the woman get her way? She got his secret soup recipes. And that's how she was able to get her way and kicked him out in the end. All right, here's another one. Number three. I'm going to miss her. Hi, I'm Dan Patrick, the Brad Paisley Bass Invitational set to get underway in Nashville. When it comes to the host himself, you can't stop him. You can only hope to contain him. We'll provide updates throughout the day. Well, I love her, but I love the fish. I spend all day out on this lake and hell is all I catch. But today she met me at the door, said I would have to choose. If I hit that fishing hole today, she'd be packing all her things and she'd be gone by noon. Well, I'm gonna miss her when I get home. Right now I'm on this lake shore and I'm sitting in the sun, I'm sure it'll hit me. When I walk through that door tonight, yeah, I'm gonna miss her. Oh, lookie there, I've got a bite. This just in, Brad's got a bite. All right, so this song is a country song and he is talking about, he's telling a story of having his wife confront him when he's out, he's at the door, he's ready to go fishing and she confronts him. The idea is that he always goes fishing on his days off, that he always goes out by himself, does his own thing and does not spend any time with his wife, right? That is the idea. He loves his wife and he loves fishing. Well, she confronts him at the door one day and finds out that he's planning to go fishing all day and she looks at him as like, you know what, you need to choose me or fishing. And so he says, I'm going to miss her. And that is the joke in the song. So the joke is the man chooses fishing over his wife. The type of humor is situational irony. Obviously, most people would choose their wife over fishing, but that's part of the joke of the song. I'm going to miss her. The original audience is young American men, typically in the American South, who enjoy fishing when they have free time. And maybe they have family tension because they spend hours and hours and hours at fishing, but maybe it's difficult to spend many hours at home with your family. So pretty, pretty funny song. All right, go ahead and watch this video. This one's going to be a little bit different. The idea of this video is what is so funny. So I want you to watch it and then come back and answer these questions. This guy stole my package from a porch and he's about to open it in his house. What he doesn't know is that this is the third generation of a new and improved custom built bait package. That's recording them on four different phones and just released a pound of the world's finest glitter along with some other nasty surprises. But to understand how we got here, we first have to go back in time a bit because that's when this couple stole a package from my porch. And even with the video footage, the police wouldn't do anything. So I vowed to use my engineering skills to go full home alone on these punks, not just to avenge my package, but as a tribute to the 2 million packages that are stolen across America every year. And because packages are taken most in December for the third year now, it's sort of become a Christmas time tradition for me to do my very small part to encourage future would be porch pirates to choose a different profession in just the most fabulous way possible. So before we see how this year's version fares in the wild, I'm going to first walk you through all the upgrades my buddy Sean and I have been incorporating into this box over the past year. For starters, we updated the outer casing, this time going for more of a cyber truck aesthetic. You can sort of see the evolution from year to year right here. As part of this, we created an intentional handle here in the hopes that the package thief will grab it, not realizing we took a page directly from the Kevin McAllister home security plan by putting extra sticky glue on the underside. This is the exact same stuff using those rodent traps. And as you can see here, it's incredibly strong. You'll also notice these two protruding rods. Those are the most critical improvement from last year, but more on that in a second. Under the hood, we made quite a few changes as well. The fundamentals are still the same, where you have a battery powered Arduino based microcontroller on a custom printed circuit board that gives instructions to these four phones, which allows us to record the thief no matter which side they open it from. But this time we upgraded the brains of the box itself to have its own SIM card too, so we can fully control all the functions of the phone at any time, including remotely triggering sounds to be played on command. And you'll see why that matters in just a bit. And this year, you'll see not one, not two, but four canisters of fart spray. I had the personal goal this year that anyone who opened this box would at least at some point comment on just how bad it smells. Dated with that, I'm using the same absolutely wretched formula that almost killed Macaulay Culkin last year. Along with just a touch or two of essence of actual skunk. I'm going light on this stuff because it lingers much longer than the fart spray and anything more than a couple drops just wouldn't be cool. And so these cams are turned by motors, which sprays the fart spray, and we keep spraying it every 30 seconds because first of all, it's ridiculous and hilarious, but second and more importantly, so they get rid of the package out of their house before they realize there's four phones inside. And this design feature makes it so we pretty much recover our boxes 100% of the time from the closest trash can or dumpster, since we already know the location of the box at all times due to the GPS tracking on the phones. But if the box does get destroyed by a package stealing glitter hater, all the phones will have already uploaded their footage to the cloud for me to see exactly what happened. And then of course we've got the main attraction, which is the spinning cup powered by a motor underneath here, which this year holds 15% more of the finest biodegradable glitter that money can buy. And so then after opening the box and just like sitting in a daze trying to process what the heck just happened, well that's when we start the countdown. And of course we know nothing happens when it gets to the end. But having just been covered in glitter and fart spray, they're going to be terrified of what this would possibly escalate to next by the time the countdown ends. And then after the countdown we have the police scanner. But this year we added LEDs so it will light up the room in red and blue lights for added ambiance. This also allows us to illuminate the package thieves face with white light in case they open it in a darker setting. And then finally we've got this lid which still has these two holes with one-way film so we can record what's going on even before it's opened. And as you can see Kevin's older brother Buzz has also been working hard this year. He's releasing not just the fictitious Buzz Buds but the entire Buzz collection. And it's just adorable when you hear some of these package thieves repeat that in excitement. And this is literally the box we use but somehow they never bother to read the side with lots of little words that would totally give the whole thing away. And so now with the lid in place you can see the function of those two rods from earlier because when the lid slides off they shoot out which prevents the natural reaction of someone who just quickly put the lid right back on again. This happened quite a bit last year and it just makes it way less fun for nearly everyone involved. And if you look at the CAD you can see how these are designed such that once the plunger is extended out by this spring this little floating chunk of steel drops down into this groove which stops the plunger from being pushed back in. This is just a beautiful passive solution and the only way to reset them to get the lid back on is to either wave a magnet here which sucks that steel chunk up thereby allowing the plunger to go back in or to turn the whole thing upside down which means the chunk falls out of the groove due to gravity. And for the final major design improvement last year it was a hassle for our porch volunteers to have to bring the boxes in and charge them every night and then remember to put them out the next day. It was also a problem if the box got stolen in the late afternoon because the phone and the box batteries could be pretty low at that point. So this year we made a custom doormat that discreetly plugs in and then inductively charges the box at all times so it's always ready to go. So the idea is after the bad guy properly disguises himself and then comes sneaking by and steals it off the porch all the batteries are at 100% charge and the box knows that it's no longer on the mat so it texts us that it's been stolen and starts recording and uploading footage and sending us GPS updates. So when they eventually get home and take off the lid the circuit board brain knows it's go time and autonomously sets everything in motion. Now is it petty to dedicate an entire year of your life to completely over engineering a box just to shoot a little glitter at someone? Yes. But at the same time could that creation still be just ridiculous and beautiful? Also yes. Okay so this is Mark Roper. What did Mark make and why did he make it? He presents the problem at the beginning. What kind of humor are we getting from this? The whole thing is is humorous but I want you to consider what kind of humor this is. Why is it funny to Americans in particular and what do you think happens after this point? If you need to go back to watch the video please do so. Give yourself a chance to answer these questions. So what did Mark make and why? He made a glitter bomb to surprise package thieves. He starts out the video by saying in America millions of packages are stolen every year and the police are not able to really do anything about it unless they're caught in the act. So even though people have cameras on their porch and they have footage of people stealing their packages before they get home well the police can't really do anything about it. So Mark Roper set out to make a nasty surprise for them. A package that spurts out glitter, fart spray, it really stings and makes a big mess and it kind of scares them. So hopefully they throw it out or try to get rid of it so that he can go and recover the package and get that footage. So it is really funny. It's a kind of dramatic irony because we know what happens but the thieves don't know what they have. This is dramatic irony. Remember it's something that we know that the characters do not. And why is this funny to Americans? Because we all share the frustration. We understand how frustrating it is to have something wrong happen to you that nothing can be done about. So this is kind of a way to like stick it to the man in a way. It's like you're helping the police out because they can't do anything about it. And Mark Roper, just to be clear, Mark Roper does work with the local police department in order to be able to communicate what he's doing and why and so that there's no issues there. But it's pretty funny. What do you think happens after this point? Mark shows footage of thieves opening his glitter bomb. That's what happens in the rest of the video. It's really funny. Okay go ahead and watch this skit. This skit is really interesting and it plays on this idea of a shoulder angel and devil. So a shoulder devil is something that comes from an idiomatic expression in America where you have to make a choice. And so a little angel poof pops up on your shoulder and a little devil poof pops up on your other shoulder and they swing. It's the cartoon illustration of your good thoughts versus your bad thoughts. Of you should do the right thing versus you should do the wrong thing. Right? Selfishness versus doing the right thing. So this is a really funny one. Go ahead and watch this and answer the questions. Take your order. Yeah I'll have a McDouble with cheese and a large cup. Okay that'll be $3.85 out of $10. There you go. Whoa that guy gave me way too much change. Sweet. Who are you? I'm your shoulder angel James. Now if you just take a knee here. That's a lot easier. Yeah right. Now James you need to return that money. Isn't your integrity worth more than a few extra dollars? Oh man I dropped the burger. Can I still serve it? Oh no. Oh yes Jason. I'm your shoulder devil. Here allow me to just. Jason nobody saw what you did. You're safe. Put the McDouble on the tray and pretend like it never happened. All right I'll do it. What? All right I'll do it. What? I knew this day would come. Hold on James. Someone else needs my help. Hold on Jason. Someone else needs my evilness. Excuse me. Pardon. Must say I'm surprised to see you. Where's the usual guy? It's his day off. Good I never liked him anyway. Gonna need that arm back Kevin. There it is. Now Jason. Jason. Jason. You shouldn't serve this food. But I only dropped it for a second. I don't care that you dropped it. I'm just saying you shouldn't serve this food. It's incredibly unhealthy. James just take the money and go. It's not your fault Mr. Incompetent there gave you the wrong change. Hey. Sorry I didn't realize you could hear me. I'll do it. Good. Wait what? You're the worst. Coming back Jason. Oh I hate her so much. Okay Jason all right. Okay. Oh my girth is overheating. What do we have in the way of cola products? Oh caffeine free. Utah. Bring me back. Listen blondie. How about I keep Mr. Incompetent and you can keep the guy with the strange body odor. Hey. Sorry I forgot you were right here. Okay so what kind of humor do you see in here? What are the elements of humor at play? Why did the angel and devil appear? And what was their goal? Okay so the kind of humor is physical humor. Obviously there's a lot of movement happening in here. The costumes and stuff are pretty funny too but it's the physical humor that really draws people in and makes them finish the video. There's a lot of awkward motions happening. No one in their right mind would ever crawl from one person to another like that but that's what happens here. The elements of humor just super awkward body movements. Why did the angel and devil appear? Because the two men were both struggling to make a choice between good and bad. Good actions doing the right thing versus being selfish and doing the wrong thing. Now what was their goal? The angel's and the devil's goal? To sway the men to their own sides. The angel appeared to talk them into doing the right thing and the devil appeared to talk them into a bad thing and that's why they had to switch is because they weren't getting the way. They were able to convince the one and had to go over to the other to convince the other and then back again. So really fun skit. Really funny concept as well. Let's listen to another song. Amish Paradise. This is a classic. All of us have heard it over here so you you might have as well or you've heard the original. The original is Gangster's Paradise but go ahead and identify what kind of humor this is and listen. Where is this? This is a parody. It is a parody of Gangster's Paradise and that is why it is so funny to us. One, yes it's ridiculous. The music video is ridiculous. It's really funny but the original song was so like I don't know there's lots of curse words and stuff. I would not let my children listen to it. It's just one of those things that is just rough and tough and you know Gangster's Paradise. Well then Weird Al comes along and puts in a parody of Amish. Amish people are the most sweet respectful people you will ever meet in American culture. They are dedicated to living simple lives without electricity for religious purposes. They're very family oriented, very kind. So turning Gangster's Paradise into Amish Paradise is is a joke in itself. So definitely a great example of a parody in American culture. Okay sometimes you will come across something where multiple types of humor are used simultaneously or at the same time. So maybe you'll get physical humor blended with satire or observational humor with puns. Consider the blend of humor in the following examples. I've selected these on purpose to give you the chance to what kinds of humor at play and how they are used to achieve a certain effect. So why are these blended and how does that best achieve the implicit meaning of the piece? Go ahead and watch this skit here. Oh she's beautiful. Congratulations YouTube. I can't believe she's finally here. Are we really parents? I mean I still feel like the same old me. Well maybe it'd help if you held her. Does her face hurt? Oh no is something wrong? Because it's killing me. Wow honey that was that was not your best. Sorry that was like something my dad would say. Oh it's fine. Hey can you wipe her nose? Thank you. Want to know how to make a tissue dance? Huh? Put a little boogie in it. Why? Her nose is running dear. Her nose runs and her feet smell. She must be built upside down. Will you stop her right now Jason? Honey when did you put on that sweater? What is going on? Oh are you a grape who got stepped on? Don't say it. Because she let out a little whine. Okay it's fine. Why don't you take a seat? You look a little tired. I'm too tired. Like a bicycle. What is happening to me? Is everything okay? I heard some noise. Don't look at me. I'm a father. What what is wrong with him? I've never seen it spread this fast before. Somebody call me an ambulance. You're an ambulance. What is happening to my husband? That's not your husband. Your husband is dead. How do we help him? We could put him on the almond diet but that's just nuts. Yeah man. I'm sorry. It's contagious. I'm a dad too. Want to hear a joke about construction? No. That's okay. I'm still working on it. It's too late. The virus will soon retire and become a grandpa. The jokes will be replaced by grumpiness, unsolicited advice and racism. Your wife's on the phone. Well tell her to put a jacket on she'll catch a cold. Male nurses way back in my day. Wait this means? That's right. Your daughter just had her baby. Okay so now that you've watched that there are three types of humor in the sketch. What are they? Before I go to the next page I want you to think about what are the three types of humor that you see and why was it funny? Did you find it funny? Okay three types of humor are situational irony. Okay this is not what you would expect to happen at the birth of your daughter. Surreal humor. This would definitely not happen right? There's super exaggerated emotions and the dad just randomly turns he just grows a mustache really quick and then he gets a fanny pack and socks and sandals and then there's the puns. The things that he's saying those are puns. Those are dad jokes. They are embarrassing and ridiculous. So the sketch is funny because it's a complete exaggeration of a dad becoming a goofball. It is a common thing in our culture to say that dads slowly become more dad like over time and they grow to where they start to really invest more in things that are comfortable. They get a dad bod which is where they get more fat and it's it's just a complete funny thing. It's a joke in our culture. So this is an exaggeration of all of that happening at the same time. The moment when his daughter is born. So why were the women upset in the video? Dad jokes are super cheesy and embarrassing and your handsome boyfriend who you married has become a complete and utter goofball and very embarrassing at that. So that's the joke. And why was the new dad acting so strange? Because he had just become a dad. Okay so let's go something more interesting now in terms of speeches. Let's go to President Obama's anger translator speech. It's a skit and a speech at the same time. Very cleverly done. Go ahead and watch and then answer these questions. Anyway as always I want to close on a more serious note. You know I often joke about tensions between me and the press but honestly what they say doesn't bother me. I understand we've got an adversarial system. I'm a mellow sort of guy and that's why I invited Luther, my anger translator, to join me here tonight. In our fast-changing world, traditions like the White House Correspondents Dinner are important. Because despite our differences, we count on the press to shed light on the most important issues of the day. And we can count on Fox News to terrify old white people with some nonsense. Sharia law is coming to Cleveland right for the day. I'm ridiculous. We won't always see eye to eye. Oh and CNN, thank you so much for the wall-to-wall Ebola coverage. For two whole weeks we were one step away from the walking dead. That was awesome. Oh and by the way, just if you haven't noticed, you don't have Ebola. But I still deeply appreciate the work that you do. Big old hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and then I plugged it. Which Obama's Katrina was that one? Was that 19 or was it 20? Protecting our democracy is more important than ever. For example, the Supreme Court ruled that the donor who gave Ted Cruz six million dollars was just exercising free speech. Yeah, it's the kind of speech like this. I just wasted six million dollars. And it's not just Republicans. Hillary will have to rage huge sums of money too. Oh yeah, she gonna get that money. She gonna get all the money. Khaleesi is coming to Westeros. Watch out. The non-stop focus on billionaire donors creates real problems for our democracy. And that's why we're running for a third term. No, we're not. We're not? Who the hell said that? But we do need to stay focused on some big challenges like climate change. Hey, listen y'all. If you haven't noticed, California is bone dry. It looked like a trailer for the new Mad Max movie up in there. Y'all think that Bradley Cooper came here because he wants to talk to Chuck Todd? He needed a glass of water. The science is clear. The science is clear. Nine out of the ten hottest years ever came in the last decade. Now, I'm not a scientist, but I do know how to count to ten. Rising seas, more violent storms. You got mosquitoes, sweaty people on the train snaking it up. It's just nasty. I mean, look at what's happening right now. Every serious scientist says we need to act. The Pentagon says it's a national security risk. Miami floods on a sunny day, and instead of doing anything about it, we've got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate. Okay, I think I got it, bro. It is crazy. What about our kids? What kind of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible boy- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey. What? Okay, no, hey. What? All due respect, sir, you don't need an anger translator. You need a counselor. No, I'm out of here, man. I ain't trying to get into all this. So what kinds of humor do you see in this video? Why did Obama use an anger translator to deliver this speech, and what is the effect on the crowd? There's a lot that we see here. We see physical humor with Luther jumping up and down and putting his hands together with those big rings on his finger, and he's looking all tough and all the stuff, chest out. And then we see situational irony where you don't expect this at a formal dinner. Okay, this just does not happen. It's a parody because they're making fun of a formal presidential dinner. They're making fun of the whole situation and how ridiculous it is. There's verbal irony in the things that he says. He says one thing, the anger translator says what he really means in a different way and in a more rude way. And then there's topical humor. It's a very formal presidential event. It's making fun of that. So why did Obama use an anger translator to deliver the speech? It's for the irony with the solemnness of the formal dinner, right? It's hilarious. It was not something that was expected and it's really funny. And then what is the effect on the crowd? Some seem to like it and are laughing pretty well, but others seem a little bit frustrated. Maybe they think that it's rude. I don't know. You can't please the entire crowd. That was a big crowd. So very interesting and very fun. A lot of us just love the speech. Okay. Here are some pictures. I want you to consider what types of humor we are seeing in these pictures. Obviously we're not seeing lots of smiling or anything like that, but there's something very comedic about them. Go ahead and think about that. Okay. So we've got a mixture of situational irony, right? So like the bride and the groom, they keep their masks on. Then we have physical humor again with the masks and they're trying to kiss, but they still have the masks on. We have physical humor of the woman. She's just like poked that through the straw through her mask and making her mask completely useless. But still, it's a funny idea. And then we have observational humor where these are daily things in COVID-19. And it is also a daily thing for people to remove their mask in order to answer the phone, even in public. So it was kind of that upper picture is really funny for that reason. So the COVID-19 obviously has just wrecked the world. And honestly, this is super relatable because of how much we had to change our daily habits. And now we can make jokes about them because we've obviously been doing it long enough. So there you go. All right. Let's watch another skit with Black Jeopardy with Tom Hanks. This one's really interesting. I want you to try to guess at the context before I explain it to you. But the one thing that I will tell you is Jeopardy is a famous game in America where people have to answer questions and the ones that they get right, they add to their pot of money. And if they win, they get designed for what is the cultural context? What is the implicit meaning of the skit? And what are the three types of humor at play? Okay. Let's take a look at what's at play here. We have situational irony and we have topical humor. Those are perhaps the most important ones that are at play. There's some others at play, but these are the two most important. So it's situational because you do not expect a far right white guy, right? Like a Strucker guy to be on a Black Jeopardy show, right? You don't expect him to be able to answer very well. And it's topical humor too, because it's on racism and misunderstandings between Black and white cultures in America. So the skit is designed for Americans, particularly it seems the older middle age, young adult to middle-aged groups. The cultural context is cancel culture in social media and tensions between Black and white culture in America. We don't understand each other and the frustration with that and people canceling each other and blocking each other on things like Twitter and Facebook and how ridiculous that is. And so this is Saturday Night Live. They're making fun of that. They're making fun of this topic. And then there is an underlying meaning. The reason they're doing this is to show that Black and white Americans have more in common than they realize. And it's some of the most ridiculous things like why would you pay $240 to a certified mechanic when you could pay $40 to the guy down the street? Everyone does that. Black and white cultures alike. So it's a very funny that this is brought up. It was a great skit with a great underlying message. Okay, let's go to the next one. Watch Jimmy discuss March Madness events. So I want you guys to go ahead and watch this talk show here. I want you to consider what it is he's talking about and why and then come back using in this segment. And what is he joking about and why is he discussing basketball at all? He's using a blend of different types of humor. He's using some topical humor in terms of this is about basketball and March Madness 2022 to be more specific. He's talking about some wit wordplay. He's using some wordplay as he goes and he's using verbal irony or sarcasm. He's kind of making fun of some things as he goes. He's joking about March Madness, so basketball in 2022. And it's a specific game in particular where something funny happened. The ball got stuck and they had to lift up a cheerleader to get it out. And they're also talking about he's doing this to be relatable. He's doing this to help people be more interested in what he's doing to bring people to his show and to make fun of something that a lot of people enjoy watching in America. Basketball season is a big deal, particularly March Madness. So a lot of people predicted this team would have done much better than they did. And then, like so many people, they had to throw out their brackets. They had to throw out their expectations and their bids and everything that they had done to bet on this team. So there you go. This is Jimmy Falun's discuss March Madness events. OK, so remember that humor is highly, highly contextualized. OK, there are certain people who will find certain things funny. You need to be mindful of the time, the culture, the subculture, period, politics and events. Note the combination of humor elements, the type of humor, paralanguage, words, phrases used. Consider the implications of the humor, like cheering people up in a tough and economic or political time like that Saturday Night Live skit or trying to get a point across where you're just trying to communicate something. Perhaps you are teaching a moral lesson in a humorous way. There's always a reason for comedy and there's always a place for comedy within a culture. So we can't really just take that out because we lose a lot of American culture. Americans enjoy wrestling with things together through comedy. So this is a great way to do that. OK, next we are going to get into story comprehension. We're going to look at short stories. We're going to look at elements of plot. We're going to look at all that stuff and utilize them to practice comprehension. So I will see you in the next lesson. Bye.