Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Foreign Languages

Years ago a friend had told me that she had heard a Victor Borge routine like this.  I have been looking for it off an on for forty years, and had concluded that this was just one of those things that Annie had made up because it sounded fun. She has passed many invented stories off as true, and I have repeated them, further misleading the public.

Yet this seems to be exactly what she was talking about.  After New York I may shop around for a longer routine of Sid Ceasar doing this.

4 comments:

engineerlite said...

I've never heard of Victor Borge doing an identifiable foreign language routine, although he did not speak English when he came to this country.

I've heard, and Wikipedia confirms, that he had several routines related to "language".

"One of Borge's other famous routines was "Phonetic Punctuation," in which he read a passage from a book and added exaggerated sound effects to stand for all of the punctuation marks, such as periods, commas, and exclamation marks.[17] Another is his "Inflationary Language," in which he added one to every number or homophone of a number in the words he spoke. For example: "once upon a time" becomes "twice upon a time," "wonderful" becomes "twoderful," "forehead" becomes "fivehead," "anyone for tennis" becomes "anytwo five elevennis," "I ate a tenderloin with my fork and so on and so forth" becomes "'I nine an elevenderloin with my five'k' and so on and so fifth."[14]"

I recall seeing Victor Borge live, and saw my usually stoic father literally fall out of his seat, laughing.

Christopher B said...

I had the same thought about Borge and Phonetic Punctuation. I'd forgotten about Inflationary Language. Sounds like she could have misidentified what she heard.

Sam L. said...

Two classic (and CLASSY) comics!

Dan Patterson said...

Genius.