The conversation segued to the general topic of racial humor, and we spent a little while feeling sorry for ourselves over how politically correct Seattle audiences tend to be. Then my friend Dan Sapegin told us about this online clip from Daniel Tosh, host of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0:

So, is it racist? Uh, yeah, pretty much (you can vote in their online poll). But it doesn’t really seem malicious, and it’s pretty funny. Does that make it OK? The debate continues…

The most significant fact of the 20th century will be that the North Americans speak English.

I’m feeling pretty warm and fuzzy about the English language these days.

I recently watched a fantastic BBC program — I think those fruits would call it a programme — called The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (link goes to the first full episode). It tells the story of English as though it were a person, starting with the language’s Germanic origins as the crumbling Roman Empire receded and Flemish tribes migrated to Britain. From there, English adapted through a succession of Danish and Viking invasions that altered and nearly eradicated it, followed by a massive infusion of French during the Norman occupation, and then it variously co-opted and shamelessly stole words from Welsh, Gaelic, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Arabic, Indian¹, Carribean, and Native American sources, among others, on its way to becoming the international lingua franca.

The fact that English is such a pastiche of other languages makes it difficult to learn, if it’s not your first tongue. The flip side of that coin is its vast vocabulary, which allows us to express ourselves in wonderfully precise and varied ways.

I think we take for granted, sometimes, just how many shadings of meaning we can deploy by finding the right words. For example, I could describe myself as happy, and that would get the basic point across. But English also gifts us with dozens of words that mean the same basic thing, with subtle yet important differences. I could also describe myself as being content, which is very different than if I’m feeling ecstatic — or cheerful, sanguine, peppy, grateful, or exultant.

One of my other favorite examples² comes from the synonyms for the word alone. We could also say solitary or isolated and in both cases, we mean very different things. Solitary has the sound of a sort of voluntary nobility, a whiff of the heroic. Thoreau was a solitary figure at Walden pond. Isolated, on the other hand, sounds involuntary and a little sad – maybe even pathetic. The Unabomber nursed his deranged grievances in isolation, not in solitude.

Hey, isn’t this blog supposed to be about comedy?

The richness of the English language is a bounty for comedians, because we can almost always find a funnier word to get our point across.

For example, the words dick and cock are perfectly serviceable ways to reference male genitalia, but the old fashioned penis (or slang peener) often sounds funnier up on stage. Dong is even funnier, and so far wang has given me the best mileage out of all of them, substituted into the exact same jokes. Groin linguistics!

1. The word “jungle,” among many others, is originally from India. So is “bandanna.”
2. I didn’t come up with this example myself, but nor can I remember who I heard it from. John August, maybe?

This Daily Show segment on Chat Roulette is one of the funniest things they’ve done in a long time:

Check out this list of the 24 best Chat Roulette screenshots for more (NSFW) lulz.