Contextual information Gesticulation is the grammatical equivalent of contextual narrative and so finds a place in this project. I am covering this first as physical actions play an important part in any comedians’ routine, but […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]