Who is Rowan Atkinson?

Who is Rowan Atkinson?

If I should ask the above stated question to a random bunch of people on the street, I'm pretty sure the majority of them won't have a bloody clue, especially outside the borders of the United Kingdom. Well, but why is that so? Isn't it sad that the talent of such a great comedian and actor is reduced to a role that shows him as a retarded, social outcast who lives together with a teddy bear and stumbles from one embarrassment to another. Maybe you might have by now concluded about whom I'm speaking, yeah it's the famous Mr.Bean – would YOU have known his real name by the way?

 

For those of you who now think about how the hell they should improve their listening skills or any skills at all by watching Mr. Bean, this post is NOT supposed to inform you about the series “Mr. Bean”, no, in fact it's the other way round.

I want you to become more conscious of the actor who represents the role, namely of Rowan Atkinson. As trough him you might very well learn English because he is able to speak a few more words than “Mister” and “Bean” and believe me, if you do like the British accent in general, you'll love this guy. 

Rowan has participated in many productions so far, although most of them are sadly only better known in England like the series “Blackadder” and “The Thin Blue Line”, two series filled with the black humor of the British. Blackadder for example is voted the second best series in the whole history of Great Britain. Why didn't they become popular outside of the UK then, you might wonder?

Well, unfortunately Blackadder's humor is based on such a huge amount of British wordplay and gags related to British history that it's almost impossible for a non-native speaker or much worse a non-English-speaking person to get the joke. Such series are a huge problem for translators in general; there you have a connection to our study. How do you translate British wordplay intelligibly in German or any other language?

So much for that. However, I won't go much more into detail about his career as an actor but put emphasis on his work as a comedian and show you some of my favorite comedy pieces of him. Let's start with his peculiar interpretation of the Last Supper – ATTENTION: Ultraconservative religious fanatics should maybe skip that part!!! 

                                    

Have you got a concept of how his comedy works, of what it consists, what exactly makes one laugh? His comedy uses mainly elements of both his incredible facial expressions (like in Mr. Bean) and foremost of pronunciation. Have you noticed how oddly he over-pronounces some words like “whence”, “professional” or  the sentences “How the hell did you do that?” and “go on, give us another one”. Let's watch two other pieces.

 

 

In your opinion, what was the fun part? Was it more the content of the speeches or the speeches themselves? Along the way, do you actually like his comedic style or rather not?
Now, last but not least an excellent example how he plays around with terms and words to build up his comedy. Take a look! 

I hope you enjoyed the pieces and if you even grew fond of Mr. Atkinson’s comedy, search for it on YouTube, there are lots of marvelous pieces. In the end I just want to point out that I don’t hate the series Mr. Bean, no, actually I love this series, I love every piece of Rowan Atkinson. I just don’t like that his overall geniality and talent are generally eclipsed by one single role. It's definitely worth taking a look beyond Mr.Bean. Cheerio!

Have a nice Halloween!!!