English

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 […]

Audience Prompts These prompts apply only to the live audience. Jasper Carrott employs a number of these with various results. The main ones he uses, some of which have been mentioned earlier, are pauses, key words or phrases and by starting the laughter himself. These may be used in conjunction with each other. A classic […]

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 […]