To be funny in Britain, you have to:

1. portray yourself as a loser and nitwit. It is you who are out of step with the rest of society, you who march to the beat of a different drummer. Brit-comic often plays the nerd, or the loony. A classic example is John Cleese as Basil Fawlty; or Morecambe and Wise, vying with each other to see who is the bigger nincompoop. Ditto the Two Ronnies, or Pete and Dud ... the unselfconsciously hopeless, pitted against a world which is basically sane. Then came Python, in which the world and the people in it were mad, and followed to the letter the logic of their own lunacy: summarize Proust competitions and parrot sketches, and

‘Buried the cat last week.’

‘Was it dead?’

‘No, we just didn’t like it very much.’

2. be brave about death. (Yank-comics won’t touch it with a barge-pole ... and Ameri-audiences don’t believe in it anyway.) But north of Watford, the sense of humour is sub-fusc black. Nothing raises a bigger laugh than a good death or funeral joke:

DOCTOR (TO PATIENT): ... You’re in great shape. You’ll live to be 90.

PATIENT: ... I am 90.

DOCTOR: ... Oh, well. That’s it, then.

Even Python raised its biggest laugh with a sketch about an exparrot who had gone to meet its Maker and was nailed to its perch.

Comprehension

Exercise 1.Make up 3–5 true or false statements to check comprehension.

Exercise 2.Sum up the main points of the chapter in your own words.

LANGUAGE PRACTICE

Exercise 3.Select 5–7 items of advanced vocabulary from the text, explain your options and practise them with your classmates.

Exercise 4.Identify and comment on the cultural component of the text.

Exercise 5. Phrasal Verbs Practice.

Write out all the sentences with phrasal verbs and their derivatives, look them up in a recent dictionary and write out more sentences with them. Translate the sentences in writing, possibly with a number of options for different speech situations.

SPEAKING

Exercise 6.Select some jokes from theBook of English Humour(see Supplementary Materials) and comment on them. Which of them do you think could have a context in the Russian culture?

Exercise 7.Use your outside reading, personal experiences, TV and video-watching, etc. to support, expand on or question the points and observations made in the chapter. Use compelling evidence and appropriate language to sound convincing.

WRITING

Exercise 8.Write a 350-word commentary explaining the cultural things and stereotypes involved.

UNIT 26. CHANGING PLACES (Film)

Watch the film carefully, take notes of the language and cultural information in it. Make up your own exercises to check the comprehension, explain and practise the cultural things and idiom. There should be at least 5 exercises with 3–5 points each. Do your observations support or disprove the points made in the previous chapters?

UNIT 27. KEEPING UP APPEARANCES (Film)

Exercise 1. Sum up the film, its cultural things and cultural impact and prepare to discuss the values and stereotypes it reveals.

Pick some of the topical idiom and work it into a survival minimum for intermediate students.

Exercise 2.Complete the charts

SYMBOLS	PATRON SAINTS	NATIONAL DAYS	TRADITIONAL FOOD
England: rose	…	April 23	…
Scotland:	…	…	…
Ireland:	St. Patrick	…	…
Wales:	…	…	Young lamb

BANK HOLIDAYS AND NATIONAL CELEBRATIONS
Name	When	Symbols	Pastime
Remembrance	November	poppy	laying of the wreaths
Day …	…	…	…

Exercise 3.Write a 400-word essay about the most important national traditions in your society and why you think people make a point of keeping them up and handing them down from generation to generation.