In this course, our objectives will be to get to grips with an essential cultural aspect of Britain, namely its comic output. More particularly, our aim is to spend our four months together laughing, failing which we’ll try to understand why others – principally the Brits – are laughing when you are not. In doing so, we hope to be able to get closer to a culture and its inhabitants, to understand them better, to communicate with them better. The course will run through a selection of authentic documents from the last 50 years in Britain. Many of the audio texts will test your listening skills to the utmost, so to help, we’ll look at a number of features of spoken English that frequently cause difficulties. We’ll read or listen to documents on the shows and their cultural backgrounds, and will also reserve some time for a few comic texts. To help in our analysis and understanding, we’ll call on a Pantheon of thinkers to enlighten our way. By the end of the course, you should have gone some way to understanding – from the inside, as it were – something about the British psyche.

The course will cover:
1. British sitcoms (The Goons, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, Yes Minister, The Vicar of Dibley, The Office)
2. BBC Radio 4 panel games (Just a Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue)
3. 1970’s innovators: Billy Connolly and Monty Python
4. Comic pairs (Pete and Dud, Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, French and Saunders)
5. Stand-up comics (Hoffnung, Jasper Carrott, Peter Sellers, Tommy Cooper, R Atkinson Esq., Billy Connolly)
6. Prime time ‘non-comic’ TV broadcasts
7. Impressionists (Ali G, Bremner, Bird and Fortune)
8. Comic texts (Bryson, Sharpe, Adams, Betjeman)
9. Theoretical approaches (Aristotle, Hobbes, Freud, Bergson, Cleese)

The bibliography is virtually endless. Some pointers:
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. Bergson, Le rire. B. Bryson, Notes from a small island. London: Black Swan 1995 Freud, Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. A. Merullo and N. Wenborn, British Comedy Greats, London: Cassell 2003 F. Muir (ed), The Oxford Book of Humourous Prose. Oxford: OUP www.bbc.co.uk Each show or artist has an extensive bibliography, some of which will be provided in the course book. Continuous assessment will include assessment of your active participation and progress in class. Out-of-class assignments will include one character study, an analytical essay, and the preparation of a joint oral presentation. Students will have the opportunity to contribute to X-Tras, the Polytechnique comedy start-up soon to go on tour in the UK, by telling jokes in the weekly Joke Duty, and by writing and performing their own scripts. There will be one listening test done in class. At least one trip to La Java in Paris(not Indonesia, unfortunately) to see live British stand-up comics will be organized (2006: Ardal O’Hanlon).

Dernière mise à jour : mercredi 8 avril 2009