Hi guys,
I saw a topic about accents in English and as a huge stand-up comedy fan, I often hear a lot of different accents.
There is a lot of material available on Youtube and I thought that maybe we could share our gems? There are so many genres in comedy, feel free to submit your findings but please keep it to stand-up.
I'll start with Dylan Moran (UK), very cynical but delightful: http://youtu.be/HNAh9_BPBFk
and Brian Regan (US), his acts are so funny and they're always clean. http://youtu.be/rX87ipNTiIY
Any suggestions?
(I hope this is ok, no copyright infigment intended)
Shawn: I agree it's not easy to learn with stand-up. I only started watching stand-up a few years ago after maybe 10 years of watching tv shows with french subtitles, than english subtitles and finaly no subtitles at all.
You have to be already fluent sure, but I believe it's a great way to train your hear. To be honnest with you, there are british jokes I just don't get, there are some references uin US stand-up I don't get either. But you know, you learn :)
Peachey: It was a test to see if you were following ^^ I love Black books, that's how I discovered those two comedians.
Speaking of Irish: Dara O'Brian is really funny, but he's sometimes a challenge to understand. He speaks really fast: http://youtu.be/fyLbpOlmJho
Oh la la: I don't like Reggie Watts sorry, too weird for me haha. Louis CK is my all time favorite with George Carlin and Bill Burr (check them out)
Dylan Moran is Irish... and that's how war begins. ;)
His <em>Black Books</em> colleague Bill Bailey has a "clean" UK accent, but I recall him talking about his original West Country accent in one of his standup routines (that accent is what we'd normally call a "pirate accent" these days).
There's also a remake of Monty Python's classic The Four Yorkshiremen sketch, and the performers (which included Prof Snape, Alan Rickman) went quite overboard with the Yorkshire accents. It's worth looking up.
I like Reggie Watts very much (even if I cant understand everything)
I think louis CK is good too (but it's too hard for me to understand)
Luke Thomson (who is a stand up comedian too) made an episode of his pocasts about stand up comedians
--> http://teacherluke.co.uk/2012/03/06/a-stand-up-comedy-gig/
Perhaps learning English from comedy is a lot harder though. For instance, not only do you need to tackle different accents, but you also need to juggle vocabulary from different subcultures or races plus try to get the punch line of the joke. For instance, trying to understand African American jokes and slang. Hmmm. Not sure.
