To finish off my 5 stars worth of audio assignments, I completed Make ‘Em Laugh, a 2 star rated assignment from the ds106 bank. I liked the idea of this assignment because I speak french (not very well) and I wanted to get some practice speaking it. I couldn’t think of any jokes off the top of my head (that always seems to happen right?) so I googled french jokes. I found one I thought was pretty funny on this website and opened Audacity.  It only took me 3 times to record the whole joke to ok standards.

Another part of the assignment was to add background music and a laugh sound effect at the end.  Since I was speaking french, I decided to put a pretty famous french song on in the background: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy. I uploaded the song into Audacity from my iTunes library and chose the middle portion of the song to play while I spoke. I searched on YouTube for a laugh sound effect and found this short clip. I was pretty tired by the time I did this, so I just used Audacity to record the laughter sounds while it played, instead of downloading the clip and uploading it into Audacity. I put the laughter at the end and exported the file in order to upload it to soundcloud.

This is the joke in French:

Un petit esquimau va à la pêche. Il fait un trou dans la glace et il entend dans un haut-parleur: il ne faut pas pêcher ici, il n’y a pas de poissons! Le petit esquimau va un peut plus loin et il entend à nouveau : il ne faut pas pêcher ici, il n’y a pas de poissons! Alors il répond : mais qui est ce qui parle? ici le directeur de la patinoire!

And here is the joke translated to English:

A small Eskimo goes fishing. He makes ??a hole in the ice and hears someone say: “Do not fish here, there are no fish!” The little Eskimo goes a bit farther but he hears again: “Do not fish here, there are no fish!” So he replies: “But who is saying this?” “Over here! the Director of the ice skating rink!”

I thought it was very cheesy and corny but also pretty funny! Don’t let the accent get in the way of finding the joke funny!