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 are not readily apparent on the taped version*. Generally speaking, it can be found in...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
