language

A George Carlin stand-up bit from Doin' It Again about soft language and euphemism, showing how softened words hide uncomfortable facts. It touches on topics like shell shock and aging.

A sketch from the Norwegian NRK show Uti Var Hage poking fun at the Danish language and how hard it is to understand.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

A clip from George Carlin's 1990 special 'Doin' It Again' in which he describes how American English has been sterilized with euphemisms, using examples such as shell shock becoming PTSD.

A Fry and Laurie sketch about language, full of absurd phrases and wordplay, which also plays on the distinction between langue and parole.

Finnish comedian Ismo does a stand-up routine on Conan about the many meanings of the English word 'ass'. He riffs on the confusing quirks of English as a second language.

A two-minute clip of comedian Bill Hicks doing his routine on marketing and advertising, with explicit language. He mocks marketers and urges them to get out of the business.

A George Carlin stand-up bit on euphemisms, tracing how language gets softened, such as shell shock becoming PTSD, until it loses its emotional force.

Finnish comedian Ismo riffs on how the English word for shit is the most complicated word in the language, with its many meanings and uses. It is a four-minute comedy bit.

A George Carlin routine on euphemisms and political correctness, tracing how shell shock became PTSD. The uploader adds context about euphemism in political language.

'Skwerl' is a short film by Brian and Karl made entirely in fake English, imitating how English sounds to people who don't speak it. It was made for Kino Sydney and shown on QI.

A comedy segment where Eddie Izzard travels to Friesland to try speaking Old English, claiming English originated in Holland and buying a cow to prove it.

A short George Carlin routine on how the term shell shock was softened into combat fatigue and then PTSD. He argues that euphemism hides the reality of suffering.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a foreigner speaking fluent Japanese is repeatedly not understood by Japanese people who refuse to process it.

A three-minute David Mitchell's Soapbox rant addressed to Americans about the phrase "could care less", arguing it means the opposite of what speakers intend. Delivered as dry British comic commentary on language usage.

A maker builds a talking banana that reads YouTube and Twitch comments aloud on stream, then fights viewers who abuse it with profanity. He ends up building a pronunciation-based filter to catch bad words.

A colorized clip from the 1970 Polish comedy film 'How I Unleashed World War II' in which a character must pronounce the tongue-twisting name Grzegorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz for a Gestapo officer.

A Studio C sketch in which Captain Literally, a superhero who takes the word literally in its strict sense, causes absurd and painful outcomes. It is a short comedy bit about the misuse of the word.

The Monty Python sketch in which a man uses a mistranslated Hungarian phrasebook with absurd results, followed by the courtroom scene.

A Hot Fuzz clip in which Nicholas Angel struggles to understand the West Country accent of locals.

A short comedy sketch by Kai Lentit lampooning an interview with a 'senior Rust developer' and Rust community stereotypes.

Totally Gridbag is a short humorous animation about the frustrations of Java Swing's GridBagLayout, originally made as a Flash cartoon.

A two-minute clip from The Wire in which characters work through the meaning of the word evacuate, an exchange that has become a meme.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

A nine-minute Stewart Lee stand-up routine about political correctness and the claim that it has gone mad. It is dry, layered British comedy that takes the complaint apart.

Full episode of Sassy Justice, a satirical local-news show from the South Park creators starring a deepfaked consumer advocate, Fred Sassy. It uses face-swapped public figures to comment on the dangers of manipulated video.

A deepfake in which Bill Hader, impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger on a talk show, visibly morphs into Schwarzenegger. It was made with DeepFaceLab by Ctrl Shift Face.

A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.

A one-minute scene from the film Enemy of the State showing absurdly implausible image enhancement, with freezing, rotating, zooming and focusing on a video.

A one-minute clip from a CSI episode featuring the trope of zooming and enhancing low-resolution images. The uploader says it was the last CSI episode they watched.

An HBO clip from Silicon Valley season 4 in which the 'Not Hotdog' app is demoed. The app classifies food photos as hot dog or not hot dog.

A short repost of a TikTok in which AI-generated voices of US presidents discuss their top five animes. It is a comedic meme video.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl code using Windows Vista's speech recognition, with hilariously bad results.

A two-minute supercut of film and TV characters ordering a computer to 'enhance' a blurry image into a perfectly sharp one. It is a remaster of an earlier 2009 version.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl scripts using Windows Vista speech recognition, with comically bad results. The footage shows the recognizer repeatedly mangling commands.

A sketch from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun in which two men cannot get a voice-recognition elevator to understand the word eleven in their accents.

Michael Reeves rigs up a camera and software that tracks a goldfish's movements to choose stock trades, tied to wallstreetbets sentiment. It is a comedic programming and electronics stunt.

A two-minute compilation of TV and film scenes where investigators say 'enhance' and a blurry image becomes sharp. It mocks the trope.

A short AI-generated parody video that imagines Harry Potter as a Balenciaga fashion campaign, made with Midjourney, ChatGPT and Eleven Labs voices. It became a viral meme.

A stand-up routine by Stewart Lee on political correctness, offering a satirical defense of inclusive language.