Zapp! English Listening 3.6 - Humour (USA: Humor)

The episode opens with a question that tells you everything about this conversation: "Funny ha ha funny, or funny as in strange funny?" From there we get a pig, a bus in Peru, a Spanish welcome committee at the airport and a long boat trip that goes badly wrong. It is 17 minutes of three British speakers laughing at things they probably shouldn't, and then admitting it. Along the way you'll hear how dark humour, sarcasm and banter actually sound in unplanned speech.

What you'll hear in this episode

There are four English conversations in this unit, all unscripted.

In the first, one of the hosts tells the story of asking for a toilet at a beach restaurant in India, being handed a torch and led off into the palm trees — and what she discovered was already waiting at the other end of the hole in the floor. Tom sets it up early by claiming that "British humour tends to revolve...around toilets", and by the end of the episode nobody is arguing with him.

The second conversation is the most useful one for learners. Amanda says British people tend to find things "a little bit blacker, funnier", and that what makes her laugh is laughing when she isn't supposed to. Tom describes trying to explain sarcasm to a teaching assistant abroad, who simply asked why saying the opposite of what you mean is funny. He says that with the North Americans he knew, sarcasm landed "like a lead balloon dropping". Katie supplies the phrase "taking the Mickey", and Tom calls the whole habit "verbal jousting".

The third is about language mistakes: embarazada mistaken for embarrassed, and two separate stories of ordering something anatomical instead of banana or chicken.

The fourth returns to toilets — a bus station in Peru, and a five-hour long boat trip in Thailand. "I think your story wins," says Tom.

Quick facts

What you'll learn

The tasks train two different listening skills, deliberately. Tasks 1 to 3 ask you to follow the shape of a story — where it happened, whether something was an accident, who was surprised — the kind of gist listening you need when a story arrives in the middle of a conversation and nobody stops to explain it. Task 4 does something harder: you're given statements that are almost right, and you have to catch the specific detail that's wrong. It was a man, not a woman. She went in the river, not beside it.

There's also a genuine language lesson buried in the second conversation. When Tom explains sarcasm — "if someone is looking really ill, you might say, oh you look really well today" — you're hearing why so much British speech can't be understood from the words alone. The same conversation shows banter in action: Katie and Amanda finish each other's sentences while agreeing what it is.

And you'll hear how real speakers stall. "I don't know how else to say that", hesitations, false starts, three people talking at once. That's the listening problem textbooks don't give you.

Vocabulary from this episode

The workbook glossary covers the terms that come up in the conversations:

• revolve around (verb) — go in a circle around something in the middle, always be about this one thing; used twice in the opening exchange
• torch (noun) — a light you can carry with you; what the restaurant owner asks about before leading the way
• sarcasm (noun) — a kind of humour where you say the opposite to what you mean
• banter (noun) — playful chat and joking; what Amanda says she missed after moving away from Britain
• taking the Mickey (informal phrase) — someone joking about something about a person
• dick (VERY informal) — penis; note the warning, and note why the chicken story needs it
• derelict (adjective) — in ruins, not lived in or cared for; describing the buildings near the bus stop
• downwind (adjective) — in the direction the wind is blowing to; the detail that makes the last story unbearable

In the workbook

The PDF and Word workbook for this unit gives you the four listening tasks with the questions before each conversation and the answers straight after, so you can check yourself without guessing. Each task has a full transcript, which is where to go when a fast overlapping exchange defeats you on the third listen.

After the main tasks there's a set of extra listening questions — does Katie eat bacon, what was wrong with the toilet on the bus — that send you back into the audio for detail rather than gist. Then a vocabulary-in-context exercise: five expressions taken from the recording, shown in the sentence where they appeared, to be matched with definitions. That's where pitch black, a lead balloon dropping, stopped them dead in their tracks, pulled up and hooked up with are taught, followed by the glossary above.

This workbook is part of the Zapp! English all-in-one pack, which covers every episode across all our courses for €39.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Common questions

Is the audio scripted?

The conversations are completely unscripted — you can hear people interrupting and losing their thread. The teaching sections that set up each task and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.

What level is this episode?

Level 3, from the Listening 3 pack. The speed and the amount of overlapping speech make it demanding, but the tasks are designed so you don't need every word.

Can I follow it without the workbook?

Yes — the audio is free and the questions and answers are read aloud. The workbook adds the transcripts, the extra questions and the vocabulary work.

Is this episode rude?

Mildly. Two of the four conversations are about toilets, and one glossary entry is marked VERY informal. As Katie puts it at the end: "the very sophisticated British humour".

Where do I start if I'm new here?

Listen once for the story, once with the questions, then read the transcript. Most learners find the second listen is where the jokes actually arrive.

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