You may not believe it, but the preceeding paragraph is actually english. Or at least a variation of it. In fact, it would more commonly be known as jive. Not that I'd really know, since I neither speak jive nor do I understand it. At all. And not that this in any way detracts from its greatness. In fact, like French rap, the fact that I can't at all understand the meaning of the previous paragraph only makes it more funny. It doesn't get much better than smack 'em, yack 'em, folks. And it's even better if you say it really fast. Of course, it takes practice to reach the speeds that Chris Tucker achieves without effort. Unfortunately for him, it's not really a race, and there's no prize for first place. Except maybe appearing in another movie with Jackie Chan. Which really would be quite awesome, come to think of it. I'm surprised that more people haven't caught on to that trick. I would expect every drama class in the country to be nothing more than people trying to speak faster than human comprehension. Because if the public doesn't have time to interpret a line, they also don't have time to realise how lame the script in question really is.
At this point, I should probably mention where all this jive jabber-jabba' is coming from, though most of you should already know. For those not in the loop, as they say, most of this jive conversation is transcribed straight from Airplane!, one of the funniest movies of our modern era. It's also one of the few movies to really give jive the official language designation that it so richly deserves. If you haven't yet seen this movie, I suggest you go see it right now. It is undeniably to comedy films what Coca-cola is to the soft drink industry. I will attempt to describe some of the jive scenes below, but please note that my description can in no way substitute for the scenes as they are presented on film.
Disclaimers aside, jive first enters into Airplane!'s comedic sphere with the arrival of the two brothers shown in the picture above. Their reasons for boarding the plane are mostly unknown, almost certainly due to their incomprehensible and extremely fast language. Before long, the two are seated on the plane telling people to 'smack 'em, yack 'em', whatever that means. Fortunately, the plane is a bilingual environment, including such things as jive seatbelt signs and emergency instructions. If memory serves me right, the jive translation for 'Please fasten your seatbelt' is something along the lines up, 'Do up yo' belt, foo'!' Of course, my memory often fails to serve me well, so don't take my word on that part. In any case, the two jive guys later become sick due to food poisoning in the fish. Unfortunately, the flight attendants are unable to interpret the nature of their illness due to the language barrier. Fortunately, an old woman nearby informs them that she speaks jive and can serve as a translator. Now that's a really useful life skill, and one that I need to work on.
As a final note, I should mention that the reason for my renewed interest in jive also stems from my contact in Japan. He is currently teaching english to Japanese students, and he made the awesome decision to use the Airplane! jive guys as a teaching aid for instructing on different dialects. That would definitely be a great lesson. I hope to soon hear a whole generation of Japanese kids telling people with straight faces to 'smack 'em, yack 'em. Right on!
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