The video we are proposing today comes from the popular British sketch comedy television series A Bit of Fry and Laurie – written by and starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, broadcasted on BBC between 1989 and 1995. Among the many peculiarities of this beloved and innovative show, we can certainly count the elaborate wordplays and innuendos on which the sketches were based from time to time. Just for instance, the show helped to enrich the English language with some memorable catchphrases – like “soupy twist”, which was used by both Fry and Laurie at the end of each episode of the last two series, and meant “cheers” (from the language Strom, also invented by Fry and first spoken during his own comedy radio series Saturday Night Fry).
In this scene, Laurie asks Fry to start a discussion about British English. Fry, acting like he is a real linguistics expert, seizes the opportunity to ask himself the question: “Is our language in function of a British cynicism, intolerance, resistance to false emotions, humans and so on, or do those qualities come extrinsically from the language itself?” And this is, more or less, how a simple dialogue between the two becomes the funny monologue of Fry – who, among other things, gives a whole new meaning to the old chicken-and-egg problem. But also: “There is language and there is speech; there is chess and there is the game of chess”, he says, making fun of the British standard ways of speaking (where some sentences are often repeated so fast to sound annoyingly rhetoric).
In short, check the video below if you’re interested in having some brainy fun with “tricky linguistics”. You will even learn how our language allows any person to say something like a unique sentence, one that nobody else ever said in the history of communication – yet, we always seem to say the same things in everyday life. …And isn’t it true, after all?
Written by Eva Barros Campelli
Communication Trainee at TermCoord
Trained Journalist at the London School of Journalism