Humour: Two bestsellers' excerpts

By Jeremy S on January 23 2018

 Some of my favourite authors are comedic writers. Here is a quote from Bill Bryson's  A Short History of Nearly Everything where he describes the method in which a chemist tested if a substance can catch fire.

“In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at once that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.”

And of course, if you have not read Tina’ Fey’s Bossypants, you need to get onto that. In this passage, she is writing about accepting her body, especially her very large eyebrows.

“Instead of trying to fit an impossible ideal, I took a personal inventory of all my healthy body parts for which I am grateful: Straight Greek eyebrows. They start at the hairline at my temple and, left unchecked, will grow straight across my face and onto yours.”

Teaching notes

These excerpts both have a punchline at the end. Bill Bryson's is dry and witty, "eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face", while Tina Fey's is concise and absurd, "...and onto yours."

Teacher Rating
0
No votes yet
Discussion
Do you find any of those excerpts funny?
Can you find the punchlines? What did you think about them?
Why is humour so hard in a second language?