Looking for sitcom scenes for a grammar exercise on reported speech (yeah, really), I wound up spending the morning watching selections from “Two and a Half Men“. Didn’t find a scene that works perfectly for that purpose, perhaps because they’re all so good it’s hard to cut them short. The scene I’m using – it’s short, the situation is clear, the language is easy – is just a bit mysogynist: Thinking a woman doesn’t even know how to do a pregnancy test? Oh, come on, give me a break! But it’ll do. (And I’m still laughing.) The exercise is making a straightforward summary of the dialogue, viz: He told him that… He asked her what… She told him she was… He said she should… She said she was… He told her to… She said she couldn’t… etc. Should work.
But the series certainly isn’t misogynist overall. I’m a big fan. And in my video trawling session this morning I found this one scene that may be atypical, but it’s just so incredibly, unbelievably, extraordinarily good. Sean Penn, Elvis Costello and Harry Dean Stanton join Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer in a support group exclusively for burnt out tough guys, getting softer with age. For the aging tough guys in my life. You rock.
2 Responses
Hi Anne,
They’re the ones that really tickle you inside – loved ’em all.
Thanks for the link.
Joanxx
Have to get this series. We went through a bottle of wine and a thing of icecream just on the YouTube vids and talked a lot about heaven. And then this morning Helmut told me he’d dreamt in English.