Benny Hill and Some Finer Points of Punctuation

If you're familiar with Benny Hill, you know the crazy skits he did with his bevy of beautiful, scantily-clad ladies. By today's standards and tolerances, he'd be hung by his thumbs in the town square, but his bits WERE funny at the time. It's thanks to him and Monty Python that I find dry, wry British humour so funny. Although some still escapes me I can appreciate it, at the very least.

When he fast-pats the bald head of the tiny old guy in so many skits, it still cracks me up and I don't even know why!

My Dad introduced me to Benny when I was in high school. It played late-nights on one of the few channels we received clearly without cable access in the rural town where I grew up. I knew as a liberated young woman that it shouldn't have cracked me up, but it still did. I'm afraid I inherited far more of my Dad's off-color humor than my Mom's, much to her chagrin!

Benny had a some memorable skits where an "actress" misread her lines and completely transformed their meaning. More than just putting the emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble, they involved actual punctuation errors or a completely wrong word.

The important thing that I enjoyed most was the cleverness of this misplacement of punctuation or misused words to completely change the entire meaning of a phrase. I love clever wordplay and in large part, it's due to watching comedies such as these during my so-called "formative years." Brits are CHAMPIONS at this sort of humor.

In one instance, the screen fades in and Benny and his current femme fatale are standing on a remote, dirt road, surrounded by woods. A perfect horror movie setup. The girl looks off in the distance, leans into Benny, and says, "What's that in the road? A head?" At which point he's startled, looks, then laughs and instructs her that the proper line should be, "What's that in the road ahead?"

In another scene, the same girl looks down and says, "What's this thing called, Love?" Benny gives that impish smirk to the camera, looks down also, then laughs again, explaining the line should be, "What's this thing called Love?" Ever wonder where Craig Ferguson got his naughty camera glances? Look no further than Benny Hill - he HAD to be one of Craig's influences!

I actually used these idiotic skits to teach my kids why punctuation is important. It's difficult to drive home the significance of adding all those little marks, aside from providing a place to take a breath (comma). It's dry delivery in the books and worksheets they brought home, and from most of their teachers, so I would do alternate things like this to illustrate, in a funny, memorable way, why we write the way we do.

For busy little boys who would rather do ANYTHING but English homework, or - God forbid - sit down and read a book, you need to make it either shocking or entertaining (or both) to wrench their attention away from the XBox or Cartoon Network. For one of my sons, I explained Math using his toys; for the other, I used money. Everyone is motivated by something different.

The below examples definitely stuck in their heads because they can repeat them back to me verbatim, all these years later! If they have children, it will be interesting to see if they also use these examples:

"Let's eat Grandma" has a vastly different meaning from "Let's eat, Grandma!"

Similarly, the statement "Zombies eat people" is much different than the command, "Zombies, eat people!"

Hey, you use what works!