Eddie Izzard is a Force Majeure

Eddie Izzard is unbelievable. 8 years of French and 2 years of German in school. And after witnessing people of many nations splashing about peacefully together in Santorini and believing that languages will unite us, he’s decided to do his show in various countries and languages. Standup comedy in  foreign tongues, not just in French, […]

Flula

Thanks to Flula Borg for deconstructing idioms and also for getting right in there with prejudices against Germans – and just dealing with them. I really like Flula being playful and silly with My Drunk Kitchen presenter Hannah Hart.

Jonathan Winters

November 11, 1925 – April 11, 2013, American comedian, actor, author and artist. In this slightly surrealistic training video from the 60s, Jonathan Winters demonstrates the 5 resistances in sales to the industrial buyer: ignorance, indifference, inertia, fear (or: indecision), procrastination He also stars in this sales training video for Mobil Golden Circle – 1966

Chris Rock – Message for White Voters

A sketch by comedian Chris Rock. By the way, it still gets me every time that a man whose mother is white and whose father is black is automatically considered black. How racist is that? Identity is a choice.

Sound wave: Owa Tana Siam

This brilliant sketch by the late Ronnie Barker is an eye-opener – or an ear-opener! – to how we preempt meaning when we listen. I found it on Abiloon’s lovely blog – full transcript there. I would use this video to raise student awareness for the way we anticipate what the speaker will say next. […]

Trouble with your empharsis

Hat tip to Nik Peachey. A nice little video to introduce reluctant learners to the usefulness of pronunciation practice, isn’t it? I’d ask students to rank the speakers according to whom they’d have most trouble communicating with.