Friday, 14 June 2013

Looking into the language that Bill Bailey used in his comedic poem


   Linking back to my previous post of the Bill Bailey transcription, what I found most interesting about it was that Bill Bailey has been well known for using non-standard English for comedy and he does it well. He is able to change quite a few of the words and some grammar in the video that the transcript is of, to produce a comedic effect for the audience's pleasure and to create a better experience for himself and the audience that had payed to see him live.
   Some theory that is possible to be linked to how Bill Bailey used language could be a few gender theories that would be to do with the content of the poem that he was reciting, although language and power theory could be helpful as well (due to the fact that one person is conducting the emotions of a large audience).
   Other data that the comedy poem could be compared with would definitely be other performances by Bill Bailey, also other comedians might be a good place to look because some performers tend to have similar ways of conducting the audience and similar styles of comedy, wile still having their own personal style.
   Another form of data that would be possible to collect is watching stand up comedy on TV, on DVD, live (although this can prove to be very expensive) and researching through books and online searches.

2 comments:

  1. I am particularly interested in it as an example of playing with Language Change - the switch between registers and the incorporation of modern references and idioms is played with for interesting effect - it could be contrasted with others who play with archaic and modern language etc e.g. Russel Brand or an investigation could contrast this with some original Chaucer poetry and look at what is used and how it links to the tone etc of the original. What other ideas does anyone have?

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  2. Those are some really interesting ideas, thank you Halla, I will definitely look into that more.

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