Shiitake mushrooms comedy sketch

Photo by frankenstoen, at Wikimedia

Shiitake (/ʃɪtɑ:kɪ/ or /ʃɪ:tɑ:kɪ/) are edible mushroom native to East Asia, which are cultivated and consumed in many Asian countries, as well as being dried and exported to many countries around the world. They are a feature of many Asian cuisines including Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and Thai. In the East, the shiitake mushroom has long been considered a delicacy as well as a medicinal mushroom. (Wikipedia)

They were also the subject of a short sketch in the popular British comedy series, The Catherine Tate Show, featuring Yorkshire couple 'Janice and Ray'.

Video lesson - classic comedy sketch - Four candles

This sketch is a popular favourite from what was one of the most popular British TV shows of all time - The Two Ronnies. It was placed fifth on Channel 4's list of the fifty greatest comedy sketches of all time, and the sketch has had at least one pub named after it: The Four Candles in Oxford.

Video lesson - The Long Johns and the Subprime Crisis

This video lesson will be of particular interest to students of Business and Financial English, or just to anyone who likes good satire

The US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 was one of the first indicators of the late-2000s financial crisis, characterized by a rise in delinquencies and foreclosures among subprime mortgage borrowers. (Wikipedia)

Subprime mortgages were primarily given to Black people (BrE), Afro-Americans (AmE), many of whom suffered considerably as a consequence. The collapse of very complicated financial instruments based on these loans in part led to the crisis of 2008.

A satirical video featuring the actors John Bird and John Fortune, also known as the Long Johns, is often seen as one of the most accurate analyses as to what went wrong. It is done as an interview with an investment banker (who looks very pleased with himself). It is very funny (in an intelligent way) and if you complete all the exercises before you watch, the dialogue shouldn't be too difficult. You might want to print off the exercises to look at while you watch the video.

Lots of sex please, we're British. But perhaps we should just disguise it a little.

Annotated discussion and quiz related to various types of (mostly slightly naughty) humour.

I would like to do a post in the next couple of days about pantomime, commonly called panto, a quintessentially British theatrical tradition which takes place at Christmas time. Panto is often described as including risqué double entendre and innuendo, which are specific types of humour. Before we look at pantomime itself, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the different types of humour we might expect to meet in traditional pantomime.

During Queen Victoria’s reign, sex became somewhat of a taboo subject among ‘polite’ society. This attitude lasted well into the twentieth century, summed up in the title of the 1971 London musical, ‘No sex please, we’re British’. This prudishness didn’t however, stop ‘impolite society’ having a good laugh at sex, mainly in Music Hall, a type of popular variety theatre which mixed comedy, song and dance, and acts such as magicians and acrobats.

Perhaps for this reason, there has been a long tradition in British comedy of alluding to sex in indirect ways, such as double entendre and innuendo. So now let’s look at some of the terms involved:

Video vocabulary quiz and a look at some collective nouns

A recent post (Let's not call a spade a spade) included the expression ‘to know someone in the biblical sense’, meaning to have a sexual relationship with them. This expression is informal and is usually used humorously. In a sketch from the British TV comedy show ‘Not the nine o clock news’, 'Gerald the gorilla', there is a rather more obvious variation - ‘to live with someone in the biblical sense’, with the same meaning.

What on earth is a 'a congregation of crocodiles'. We take a look at the strange world of collective nouns.

Video lesson - Mr Mann's disappointed horse

I sometimes use short comedy videos in class and I find that students usually really like this particular one, a clip from the BBC series Little Britain. I've gone off the show a bit now, but I still think this one of the classic sketches of British comedy.

The vocabulary in this clip is not easy, but I've found that when students do these exercises first, they can 'get' most of the jokes.