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A Bit of Fry & Laurie - Concerning Language
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- Опубликовано: 7 дек 2012
- SCRIPT LOCATED BELOW!
A montage of two sketches from "A Bit of Fry & Laurie" with some great takes on linguistics.
The first sketch is from the 2nd episode of series 1, the second is from the 6th episode of series 2.
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PART 1: abitoffryandlaurie.co.uk/sketc...
PART 2: abitoffryandlaurie.co.uk/sketc...
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To anyone who likes this sketch and is interested in the subject in general, I urge you to read this essay by Stephen Fry on language:
www.stephenfry.com/2008/11/04/...
(Or if for some reason you can't read it, here's the audio version of the essay, read by Fry himself: www.stephenfry.com/2008/12/22/...
To anyone who likes this sketch and is interested in the subject in general, I urge you to read this essay by Stephen Fry on language:
www.stephenfry.com/2008/11/04/dont-mind-your-language%E2%80%A6/
(Or if for some reason you can't read it, here's the audio version of the essay, read by Fry himself: www.stephenfry.com/2008/12/22/series-2-episode-3-language/ )
ooo that was cruel, i like it!
ha, you mean this is a source? That's really funny, then/
Can't get that podcast to work at all, but thanks for the link to the blog post, Stewie Griffin
+Stewie Griffin That blog post was simply fantastic. I love the way Fry uses language-- written or, in the case of the sketch, spoken. Brilliant!
NEW LINK: You can listen to the audio version here:
www.podcasts.com/stephen_frys_podgrams_audio_visual/episode/series_2_episode_3_language
Deeply philosophical topics brilliantly disguised in comedic delivery
I like to believe these sketches are based on conversations Fry and Laurie have had while super high.
There's a podcast Fry used to put out, and one of the episodes, the one on language, contains an alarming similarity with these 2 sketches, so it's not just drivel. Check it out, it's quite captivating.
''let me explain, expound, expand, exposit'' genious!
The first time I watched this I just laughed because of the dynamic of the two.
The third time I could understand most of what he was saying and laughed at his astonishing verbosity.
The fifth time I actually began to draw meaning from his speech and began to question the topic myself.
The tenth time I realized "hold the newsreaders nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers" is a real sentence that actually has an intended purpose. Amazing
After watching this sketch a few times scattered in a period of 10 years and having always enjoyed it up to the level you mentioned on your second sentence, I'm going to do exactly what you explained from scratch. Thing is, I'm not native English at all. Wish me luck.
Please explain the purpose or meaning of the sentence to me.
Two friends are at a café, one of them drinks milk while reading a newspaper. He comes across a funny joke and is about to laugh and spill the milk through his nose onto his friend's trousers. His friend then preemptively asks the waiter to squarely hold the newsreader's nose to prevent the catastrophe.
That's how I picture it.
the problem is, wouldn't that sentence take so long to say that the waiter would not be able to react in time ?
Yeah, no
He's being both ironic and sincere. What he says here is very profound and on point.
I'm half convinced that they just put Stephen on a couch during one of his manic episodes and just kept rolling
Frank Looman We won’t know the difference
And amongst the topic at hand as Stephen Fry was explaining, you realize an awesome fact. All this time, with verbal language being the subject as explained by Stephen Fry, is backed up by Hugh Laurie, who is using primarily body language to get his own message to the audience.
Body Language with Hugh Laurie, Audible language with Stephen Fry. The Slapstick vs the situational together in a grand meeting.
karmaofgood Stephen's body language is far more expressive 😉
"Beauty is duty and duty beauty, so there".
Oscar-Wilde-ness detected.
Stephen Fry is Oscar Wilde reincarnated into a more liberal age.
"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter - or friendly milk will countermand my trousers" needs to replace "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" in all linguistics 101 textbooks.
Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
Simply the most brilliant linguistic achievement I've ever come across!
I have a friend who, after a few drinks, speaks exactly like Fry in this vid. I at times wish I had more friends like that while at others I simply bathe in the warm cognisance of the uniqueness with which he imbues my life..... and at yet others I wish he would just shut the fuck up and piss off home already. :P the only constant in the tumult of our relationship is that I love him to bits.
+Gabriel Rd I think all of us would like to have a friend like that.
J.A. Brown
Have a hunch
you're a pair well match .
Merely a reflection
of yourself .
Stephen's expression in these just out does them all.
At 4.00 Fry "in a sense, in a sense, IN A SENSE..." and Laurie shrinking away...total class
A unique child delivered of a unique mother! :)
And yet, oh and yet, all of us spent all of our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time…
'I love you, don’t go in there, get out, you had no right to say that, stop it, why should I, that hurt, help, Margery is dead'!
That surely is a thought worth taking out for a cream tea on a raining Sunday afternoon…
Pure Class - Genius!
"EX! TRINSICALLY! EX! TRINSICALLY!"
"The substance of which you exhibit a property must exist;where is it?"
[Hugh looks for it behind the sofa]
The Kings college bar in cambridge about 9 pm,on a friday night.
Stephen Fry is a fantastic man. :D
Steven is basically delivering an almost-serious dissertation about language, with real and true theories, and Hugh is most of the English-speaking world, failing to understand what's happening with Steven's mouth.
"Cobwebs long overrun by an old wellington boot" if I heard that correctly
"Noel -as you so rightly- Harrison."
This is funny, but there's some genuinely interesting Plato-style thought going on in this sketch!
"Therefore you contain a property of beauty, so the substance of which you contain the property exists. Where's beauty?"
Actually an interesting thought. Most of what he said makes sense and is very interesting.
Aristotle, actually, but yes.
Extrinsically... Extrinsically
You cannot not do the 'extrinsically extrinsically' moves :)
CAPBUBLE
*EX*-trinsically
This is exactly how I get when I'm drunk.
Marjorie is dead.
DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No! She was just injured by falling off Thunderbolt! She's in the drawing room now.
Holy crap, I have a physics online pre-lecture thing, but the guy who's narrating it has the same speech pattern as Stephen in this sketch. I can't take it seriously. He's trying to teach me about frictional forces but all I can think of is this.
It's Kant's Rejection of Ontology with Stephen Fry's inimitable overacting. Pure genius.
What actually immensely beautiful writing!
How can this sound so sensible???
Seriously, how the hell he came up with that 'never-before'-sentence is just beyond comprehension!
I mean, this isn't nearly as easy to do as people might think. To come up with a sentence that is grammatically correct, makes absolute semantic sense (very important) and yet is almost certain to have never been uttered in the whole history of english!!?
Try it yourselves, should make for a fun couple of days ;)
Great sketch, thanks Stewie Griffin! And many many thanks for also sharing Fry's essay on the subject!
It's a fantastic read. It articulates and thereby redeems many of the nebulous thoughts that were until now simply lolling around directionlessly in my head.
But, when Fry talks about his hatred of pedantry, I think he may have made the same mistake as do those who club all grammar- and language-lovers under the general head of "pedantic nerds". Crimes of grammar are not always unforgivable, I am happy to concede, but there is a limit beyond which tolerance degenerates into apathy.
If language is wine then grammar is the container in which it is served. How would Fry like to have his favourite wine served in a large flat dinner plate? To have his soup from a cracked bowl, or his fondue without the aid of a fork?
Neither of these scenarios is impossible to do, and might even be termed creative in some universe, yet it is plain that doing so would absolutely kill the joy of drinking the wine or eating the food - unless you've been starving for weeks in the middle of a desert, in which case both scenarios would be visions of Paradise to your mind's dulled eye.
To use Fry's own theory, it is the implication of not caring that rankles me about incorrect grammar and bad choice of words.
Yes, 'let there be pleasure' above all, but not without regard to a certain underlying structure, for in the absence of structure linguistic creativity ceases to be beauty and begins to become noise. An annoyance rather than a joy.
You cannot truly love without also feeling respect. You cannot love language without respecting structure. If you love without feeling respect, then you make language your whore.
This is utterly brilliant!
this show is the most feverish stream of consciousness I've ever seen. It's like a dream you have when going to sleep immediately after eating a pound of hot peppers.
This isn't a sketch, it's just Fry on coke.
ʕ´•ᴥ•`ʔ
I hardly think it matters
if Fry is fried or not.
Are you the authority ?
Did you get your credentials
from peer councilling course. ?
Surely they advised you
not to diagnose your victims.
Do you piss on everyone's parade ?
two queens of theater, its going to be a cold dark day when we lose them
Windmills of your mind is my favourite song ever! This reference has made happy.
This reminds me of "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg
Hats off to these gentlemen!
Love these 2 guys.
I have absolutely no idea what Stephen just said, but I do know it was hysterical to listen to.
This is a parody of Brian Magee's famous philosophy TV show.
Because the beauty and genius of this sketch is that not only is it hilarious, Stephen is actually making completely valid and much discussed points on linguistics and philosophy.
Ca-P-Ble!
My favorite Fry and Laurie skit
'The hulk of a charred Panzer' may well be my favourite line I've ever heard.
Heh. Was just watching this at home from the box set, glad to find it shareable online. Indeed, Stephen Frye seems to channel Wittgenstein and Beckett and filter them through his own uniquely brilliant brain.
how the hell do they memorize these things, or are they just winging it the whole time?
I wonder how much blow you need to pull these sketches off... regardless they're brilliant.
This is absolutely fantastic. Mr. Fry is a true lord of the language.
I would say, of talk.
Fry deserves an Oscar just for keeping a strait face during that speech.
This makes me so happy!
So this is why Fry is great :)
This is beautiful.
The audience keeps laughing and I'm just staring at it like.. the fuck did he say?
Of course the key to this sketch working is the straight man, by which I mean comedically and not by pure coincidence, sexually. Laurie's character goes from making sense and joining in to getting completely lost along with the rest of the audience. Fry's bit would be funny in monologue but I don't think it'd work without 'I think he said "vulva"' interspersed within.
Please, please, someone reassure me that that hair of Stephen's was a wig...
I understood everything ...and at the same time I didn't understand anything O.o ??
Phenomenal!!! A capabbble speaker lol
Beautiful.
I think he said vulva...?
"...friendly milk will countermand my trousers." Indeed.
I did not get the joke until I listened to some BBC programmes on culture... Spot on Fry and Laurie
Funny and brilliant and thought-provoking! Like most good things.
These two are such geniuses 😂😂😂😂
in Dorset _alone_
Both makes me laugh and reminds me alarmingly of grad school.
This becomes even more incredibly funny after studying literary theory.
why is it funny? it is so amazing!!!
Sublime
Beautiful
Language is a complimentary lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette.
Brilliant.
Stephen Fry is a genuis madman!!
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously -- Chomsky
British humor is an acquired taste over here in the US. I mean, we all love MP Holy Grail, but this style of comedy takes some getting used to
Because it requires intellect. I have heard of a Anti-intellectual movement in the US. We all know the Republicans point of view, but I wonder if this distrust against anything complicated or anyone who's above the average intellectual standard is also visible among the people. If so I find it very disturbing...
tuur verheyde Asimov spoke of the anti-intellectualism in the US in the 1950s. I think it comes from a sense of misplaced pride that because they live in a country that boasts that it's the greatest, they don't have to keep up with the world. I'm not generalizing to say all Americans (as I, too, am American) but I see the entrenched self-entitlement and moral superiority stopping people (kids, too) from wanting to learn or even willing to realize that they might be wrong.
We're taking the piss out of ourselves. This sketch is incredibly insightful, but because neither of them wants to appear actually intelligent, they decide to talk in an over the top 'intelligent style'. It's funny on two levels as a result. It's insightful and stupid at the same time. This is British humour at its best: look up Peter Cook. Peter Cook is hugely influential on this kind of humour.
John Doe
Not so much taking the piss out of ourselves in the whole as a certain sort (largely English but not exclusively so) that inhabits Eng Lit, Arts and philology departments, and often turns up on Radio 4 or obscure late-night BBC2 arts programmes (or used to, at least). I'm no longer a universal fan of Fry's stuff (far too much of which is imported here when there are many better British series that could be), but IMO he is at his best with his pin-sharp parodies of (mostly) English 'intellectuals' such as this one. The only peer in puncturing certain English types I can readily think of is Peter Cook.
Then again, US humor is still working its way up towards 1920s Buster Keaton level and for the most part passes for festival toilet wall grafitti over here...
our language tiger
Because, while simultaneously being hysterical, Stephen is articulating real philosophical ideas in the fields of linguistics, epistemology and phenomenology. People have written their phDs about what he jokes about here. So, basically, he is a genius.
Absolutely and utterly Hilarious, Stephen Fry is amazing
Just like my current OU dvd's....
It certainly is.
His question about demagoguery in the English language/sphere is so damn relevant these days. And still funny as hell.
Am I the only one who understood all of that? Fry's actually making fairly good sense, in that science has proved that the language we speak has a distinct impact on our actual thought process, so it's entirely possible that English, as he says, is not capable of hitlerian demagougery, it simply would not be taken as flatly, as at face value, as it would be in the German. As for the distinction between language and beauty, as it were, words, as he says, can be euphonous, be pleasing to the ear and thus beautiful, regardless of their actual definitions. This has less to do with the perceptual part of our brain that understands the language and more to do with the perceptual part of our brain that comprehends sounds. It's musical, if you will, it's the musical quality to language. Hopefully I'm making sense here.
There's a thought I wouldn't mind holding.
And by Demagoguery you mean...?
GamerAse
I think by Demagoguery he means demagoguery. Highly charged oratory, persuasive whipping up rhetoric. I guess. And yet, and yet, there is a question that fills me up with bitter ambiguity and makes me chew on my pillow in nervous anticipation of the Inevitable, the shade of which crawls closer and closer day by day on my duvet, so that every morning I find on my sheet a tiny puddle of the fine, frothy mixture of saliva, blood, and splinters of my violently ground teeth, and this question is: how thick is the veil that separates lies from half truth, and half truth from pretty statements which could even be called Truth? What is the source of the supernatural-looking touch that turns a simple positivistic statement into a normative one? Is this veil made of the same material as the touch? Or are the touch and the veil the very same substance? And who can grab the very concept, or idea, if you will, of this substance?
Answer this, if you can, while I am looking for my medication.
georgejohnsmith
Hello. We're talking about veils, we're talking about substance.
GamerAse
My dear boy! Now tell me, tell me, have you modeled before?
I'm amazed it took 30 years for steven fry to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Who looked at this dude and went "yup seems good, seems healthy"
No it's just hilarious having a murder scene described in deadpan.
CAPUBLE
The second sketch is better, but they're both excellent :)
"I'm going to hold an idea now"
I like these two ...
No no no .
I LOVE these two men.
Thankfully I found this pair.
seeing this makes me realise, where, a huge chunk of my sense of humor "came from" , i do not think i even existed when this was shown, and, i do not remember watching these, but it heavily influenced my polo factory, which a disgruntled washing machine salesman barked at, then i know not which bouncing red arrow, was to acertain my deliberation of nautical jiblets, reciting naught but a coffee cup
We played this in my philosophy class, i was the only one who laughed...
We played it during linguistics competition preparation (: Freaking great.
Well, the same jokes heard live many times in a row and being twisted by unexpected laughter or mistake can be as amusing or even more than the thing done fluently and with perfectly straight faces.
Haha, oh man. This made my day.
I can clearly see it took maaaaaaaaaaaaany, mmmmaaaaaaaany takes to film this thing.
I am Hugh Laurie in this sketch
Extrinsically EXTRINsically
Thanks
"Language is the universal whore that I must make in to a virgin." Love it!
Wondering if this is based in part on the 'Philosophy and Literature' couch-based chat show with Bryan Magee... see here for example: Iris Murdoch on Philosophy and Literature: Section 1
With Stephen, it's the bits that aren't on the page.