Zapp! English Colloquial 3.6 - Humour
Taught by Katie Wood — Cambridge CELTA · Cambridge DELTA · Cambridge-accredited Teacher Trainer
Recorded and taught by a team of British and North American English teachers, based in Oxford (UK) and Barcelona (Spain).
Katie opens by asking Tom where they are, and he answers: "Sitting on Sitges beach, in the sun, under an umbrella." Then she warns him his brain is about to start working. "Try me," he says. What follows is thirteen minutes of guessing games about humour, laughter and teasing — including a moment where Katie admits that the word "underpants" all by itself cracks her up. Some of these expressions you could use with anyone. Two of them you really could not.
What you'll hear in this episode
Katie describes an informal expression, and Tom has to guess it. He gets the first one immediately — "It cracked me up" — and when Katie asks what kind of thing has that effect on him, the answer is purely physical: "when somebody falls over in the street", or somebody who "walks into a lamppost".
From there the register drops. Tom supplies the strong version of laughing a lot, then explains it with more anatomical detail than strictly necessary. When Katie moves on to "I nearly split my sides", he hesitates — for him that one belongs to "the older generation", and one of the speakers says he can imagine his father using "taking the Mickey" too.
There's a lovely bit of live self-correction in the middle. Tom defines "pulling my leg" as "to tease someone", then immediately withdraws it: "It's not to tease someone, I'm wrong about that." His better version: "It's to provoke a reaction."
The second half covers teasing a friend who has shaved their hair off ("You look like a tennis ball!"), a guess of "funny chappie?" before Tom lands on "a good laugh", and a short argument about whether the verb is laff or larf — one host declares "laff is correct", then concedes "they're both fine". Tom also gets caught in the act and confesses: "Yeah, I'm only winding her up." One of the hosts finishes with a story about working in a pub, where the same three little old men came in every morning with a new dirty joke.
Quick facts
| Episode | Colloquial 3.6 – Humour |
| Pack | Colloquial 3 |
| Level | 3 |
| Duration | 13 minutes 40 seconds |
| Speakers | Katie and Tom |
| Expressions taught | 10 |
| Format | Unscripted conversation plus scripted teaching sections |
| Workbook | Included in the €39 all-in-one pack |
What you'll learn
The real skill here is register — knowing which expression is safe with whom. The workbook grades all ten items 1, 2 or 3, and the conversation makes the grading audible: Katie stops to point out that "the word piss is very impolite for most situations, so you'd have to know somebody very well", and adds "Be careful with that one!" Two expressions carry the same meaning as their politer twins and differ only in who you can say them to.
You'll also hear how native speakers negotiate meaning in real time. Tom offers a definition, rejects it a few seconds later, and replaces it with a better one. Learners rarely get to hear that process, and it's a useful model: a first attempt is allowed to be wrong.
The scripted Meaning and Pronunciation sections then take over. They prompt you by keyword — the one with the word up, the one with the word myself, the one with the word sides — so you retrieve each phrase from memory rather than just recognising it. After each answer you repeat, twice, on the beep. Some prompts give you a full model sentence: "They always take the piss out of him about his clothes", "Don't tell dirty jokes near the children."
The ten expressions
The workbook glossary marks each one 1 (fairly safe), 2 (informal, for people you know well) or 3 — with the warning "Don't use this with your mother-in-law!!!"
- It cracked me up. (2) – it made me laugh. Tom's very first guess.
- I pissed myself laughing. (3) – I laughed very hard / a lot (slang – strong).
- I nearly split my sides. (1) – I laughed very hard / a lot.
- You're winding me up. (2) – to get someone excited, to try and make them believe something that is not true.
- You're pulling my leg. (1) – joking, trying to get me to believe something which is not true.
- Pull the other one. (1) – I don't believe you. Literally: pull my other leg.
- to take the piss (3) – to tease and make fun of someone (slang – strong).
- taking the Mickey out of someone (1) – to tease and make fun of someone.
- a good laugh (1) – good fun.
- a dirty joke (2) – a joke about sex.
In the workbook
The Colloquial 3.6 workbook gives you the full transcript of both halves of the conversation, so you can go back and see exactly how Katie sets each clue up and where Tom hesitates. After the transcript comes the graded glossary above, then two practice exercises.
Practice Exercise 1 is word ordering: you rearrange scrambled words into sentences that contain the unit's expressions — from "was / I / nearly / sides / It / so / split / my / funny" to "mother / like / doesn't / jokes / dirty / My". It forces you to produce the whole phrase, in order, rather than half-remember it. Practice Exercise 2 is a matching task: five sentence openings, five endings, including "I couldn't stop laughing, I nearly split…" and "You totally crack…". Answers for both exercises are included at the back.
The workbook comes with the rest of the Colloquial 3 material in the all-in-one pack, alongside every other Zapp! English conversation and its exercises.
Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39
Questions
Which of these expressions can I actually use?
Check the number beside it. A 1 is fine in most spoken situations, a 2 is for friends, and a 3 may upset or offend people. Both "take the piss" and "I pissed myself laughing" are 3s.
Is the audio scripted?
The conversation between Katie and Tom is unscripted — that's why he corrects his own definition halfway through. The teaching sections that set the tasks and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.
Is it laff or larf?
Both. The hosts disagree about it on air, one jokes that "laff is correct", then admits "they're both fine".
Do I need the workbook to follow along?
No — the audio stands alone and the pronunciation drills work by ear. The workbook adds the transcript, the graded glossary and the two written exercises with answers.
What does "pull the other one" actually mean?
It's short for pull my other leg — in other words, I don't believe you. Katie explains the logic in the recording.
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