Using colloquial accents General discourse, communicating directly with the audience, is what makes or breaks a comedian. If you read a humorous sketch – such as ‘Driver-in-Law’ – it is not the words themselves that make you laugh, but the images that they conjure up. In the book form this is somewhat restricted. You can […]

Tuts Unconscious ‘tuts’ only appear in the first half of his act and are usually preceded by a very short pause and followed by ‘and’ or ‘er(m).’ They may just be used as fillers for time or while he thinks out his next sentence, but there is evidence to suggest that they are possibly mnemonic

Pauses Pauses, coupled with intonation, are a significant part of speech and in Jasper Carrott’s routines have a number of different uses. These can be divided into deliberate and unconscious pauses. The former will include stopping for breath, pausing for a build up or to prompt a response from the audience. The unintentional pauses, which

Reformulations Without getting into the added complexities of following your conversations with others, generally speaking, whenever you speak you are doing at least three things at once. You are planning what to say next, saying what you previously planned and monitoring what you just said in order to check that it is actually what you

Audience Address Comedy is like any other commodity – it can me marketed. And like any market the style must suit the targeted audience. The approach to a television show like ‘Carrott’s Lib’ is different from that of his theatre shows and different again from the form used in his books. The greatest difference between

Sentences As has been shown in the preceding posts, there are a number of differences between the written and spoken material. in this section I shall look purely at the words used and how they are strung together. A table of all the grammatical statistics can be found in appendix E – Grammatical statistics. To

Conclusion Based on this study of Jasper Carrott’s ‘Mother-in-Law / Learner Driver’ sketch I can conclude that his delivery has indeed become much more polished with time. In conjunction with intonation, gestures and use of accents, his final act sis so well rehearsed that, grammatically, it is as highly structured as the version found in