Stand up jokes for boosting up vocabulary

You definitely have heard of Mrs. Maisel. If you haven’t, she is worth every bit of your attention, for she really is marvellous. This TV show is currently on my list of favourites, even though I was prejudiced against it at first. A series about a stand-up woman comedian? A comedienne? In New York in the middle of the previous century? I was full of scepticism, which I was happy to shove back to where the unfair scepticism should go, for this is an absolutely amazing series, and Mrs. Maisel is a one a kind class act gagger and an absolutely charming lady (and a Jew, if you know what it means in terms of sense of humour) played by a uniquely gifted actress.

This paragraph can hardly accommodate another enthusiastic attribute without the risk for the author to seem frighteningly ecstatic, but I will just squeeze the “unsurpassed sense of humour” cliché here, with the note statement that it is in no way a cliché in this case. 

Now we are all set for the subject of the article, which is making jokes useful for ESL teaching. Today we’ll focus on vocabulary: how to use a stand up performance to contribute to boosting a learner’s vocabulary. It brings us to another question: why stand up comedy, what makes this genre so special compared to other verbal content? 

Anyone who cared to reflect upon what exactly makes stand-ups a fun (or a bomb), would notice that the comedians employ a whole arsenal of laughter-engendering weapon, from the genre-specific “canned jokes”, twists and timing to more universal stylistic and comedic devices, like tropes, idioms and all kinds of wordplay. In this latter group, pun may be rendered as the most common. And it is a pun that deems a very promising tool for vocabulary learning. 

“Is life worth living? It depends upon a liver.” In this example, the underscored word displays two meanings, each of which is relevant in the context. So studying puns is a literally economical way of enlarging vocabulary, you get two meanings of a word in one phrase. In view of the fact that most of the English words are polysemantic, this economy is no laughing matter ☺ Another thing is that this activity motivates using monolingual dictionaries, the skill that is often overlooked and sits in students’ zone of proximal development for years. 

Puns can be of different quality, ranging from subtle to nasty, but as in any sphere, the quality depends not on the mechanism but on who uses it. Mrs. Maisel is not a Petrosyan, take my word for it. 

Let’s take a look at one of Mrs. Maisel’s stand-ups, the one from the episode in which she kicks off her first big tour and performs at an Army base filled with soldiers.

This fragment is based totally on puns, as she pretends to not understand the military jargon (or rather, pretends to understand), and to demonstrate that she exposes the other meaning of the military term, the one that has nothing to do with the army, but rather refer to more “womenish” issues, like appearance, romance and child-rearing, as well as sex, which is a slam dunk for her audience.

In the script below the underlined military jargon phrases are defined in a way that the original phrase acquires a new twist. (Midge is Mrs. Maisel’s name, by the way):

Midge: You guys have your own language here. It’s so fun. A soldier said he was gonna go sit on the honey bucket, and I was like, «I’ve been called a lot of things, pal » I almost smacked him. So I got to keep out of trouble here. Maybe you fellas could run some jargon by me? Make sure I understand it. What are some of your other phrases? 
Soldier 1: Direct support.
Midge: Too easy. That’s what I’m wearing under my dress right now.
Soldier 2: Zone of action.
Midge: Everything not covered by the direct support I’m wearing.
Soldier 3: Rear guard.
Midge: Diaper cream.
Soldier 4: Friendly fire.
Midge: A cute redhead.
Soldier 5: Frontal fire. Shock action.
Midge: Frontal fire and shock action? Isn’t frontal fire what you contract when you have shock action with the wrong girl overseas? Huh? 
Soldier 6: Withdrawal.
Midge: Congratulations, you’re a daddy. Oh, boy. Well, you sure know how to make a girl feel welcome. That’s all for me today. I’m Mrs. Maisel. You boys stay safe out there, ’cause you’re just too cute to lose. Thank you and good night.

So, what can we do at an English lesson with this? We can actually dissect humour, that unique occasion when this activity is not pointless.

Put your student in the picture as to what kind of TV story it is, introduce the character and the setting, if necessary. Ask them if they enjoy the genre of stand-up, let them share their favourite names and jokes with you. If your student is all serious, motivate them by the chance to scientifically unveil the magic of producing laughter. Introduce the notion of pun as a twist of meaning. Ask the student to count, how many puns/twists there are in the fragment and show the fragment. Discuss the result (the answer is 7). 

Show to the student how the first joke works. Expose the meaning of “direct support” in the monolingual dictionary. Since Midge ostensibly is not aware of military jargon, her definition foregrounds the more common meaning of the word “support”, which is “something that holds something firmly or carries its weight, especially from below to stop it from falling”, and mentioning that she is “wearing it under her dress” twists the phrase to the definition of lingerie. 

Offer the student to go over the rest of the puns the same way, assist them with the wording for explanation and encourage to use monolingual dictionaries. At the end of this activity, you’ll get two lists of meanings for these seven phrases. You may ask the student to think of two different stories with these words, in the first one they should use the expressions as military jargon vocabulary, and the other one should bring out the common meanings of these phrases. This very fragment is beneficial for this sort of task, as there is at least one distinct semantic area in the first group of meanings, that of the military.  

Since the fragment has sensitive content, it’s adult-only, but you are sure to find more neutral stand-up examples in this series or among the actual club performances, like Milton Jones’. 

I guess, this TV show is going to the ascendant to “The Big Bang Theory” in my course of English based on series and movies. Taking into account that I first heard about “The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel” from one of my SkyEng students, and the title rings a bell to everyone I would mention it to, the odds for this show to become a household name are quite big. The memes are already infinite.