I woke up Thursday morning to an email from Guilherme. My
first instinct after seeing the subject “meeting today” was that something had
come up so that our meeting for the day was to be cancelled. Oh contrary.
Guilherme had emailed me two video links to one of his favorite funny YouTube
hits. Since my day was so packed I didn’t get a chance to watch the clips
before we met, so we started our meeting in Union Grounds this way this week.
These clips instantly reminded me of “Whose line is it anyway?” Guilherme explained to me that this a skit group out of Brazil that does live performances that are not actually aired on TV, but instead are only put online. This forces their faithful followers to go and watch the show live. Similar to “Whose line is it anyway?” “Os Barbixas” (the show) has the stage with color paneling and even four chairs for each of the four comedians in the back. Guilherme defined “Os Barbixas” roughly as “the moustache men—or something along those lines!”
Unlike German humor that we learned about this week, the Portuguese jokes translated pretty well into English. We both giggled as we watched these clips, I proceeded to show Guilherme clips from “Whose line is it anyway?” because of the strong association that I had developed in my head. He was bummed to hear that this, too, would have to be purely a YouTube entertainment source since “Whose Line” isn’t on TV anymore.
After we watched the clips Guilherme gave me more background
about the show. Watching them again, there are a lot of things in “Os Barbixas”
that the comedians referenced that were either in English or were straight from
our culture. One of the things I noticed watching these clips a second time is
that in one video when the prompt is “a conversation between cereals” two
references that we can understand are made. 1. Frosted Flakes: “How about some
milk, tiger?” and 2. One comedian
shoots at the three others and
proceeds to say “cereal killer.” Something that Guilherme and I both laughed
about. We did discuss at our meeting the references to Santa and the North Pole
and Danny Devito that I caught the first time watching these clips.
Guilherme also
explained to me the “funk” referenced in one of the skits. (The context of this
was that one of the prompts was something like “things not to do at a Funk.”) A
funk in Brazil is the equivalent to a rave in the US. Guilherme struggled to
describe to me the wardrobe of the “funk” population and became visibly
uncomfortable—we were both able to laugh about it though. This led us to talk
about how neither of us really likes the rap music scene. Not surprising.
Watching these clips a second time, the part about the funk was hilarious.
In class and in my
discussion with Guilherme it has been interesting to both compare and contrast
humor on a global scale. I think that the bonding aspect of humor that we
discussed when reading Morreall definitely came into play in Guilherme and I’s
conversation today. It is cool to be able to sit down and enjoy something like
that with someone of a completely different cultural background.
We mostly enjoyed
talking about humor this week and laughing at the one liners in the clips we
watched. At the end of out meeting Guilherme did get the chance to tell me
about his long-anticipated weekend of volunteering for the Destination
Imagination competition. Guilherme had a blast judging the project of 1st
to 3rd graders in this competition, and retelling the story. We got
into a very interesting conversation about how this was a great English
learning opportunity for him to see children’s written English and really
interact.
I have attached the
clips we discussed, enjoy and be sure to put on the English subtitles!
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