From the New Safety Dance to Sign Language in Comedy

One of the latest viral videos features flight attendants from Cebu Pacific Airlines performing the safety check procedures as a dance routine to the music of Lady Gaga. This gives a whole new meaning to the Safety Dance. After a summer of flying so often I thought I wouldn't want to set foot on another airplane for a long time. But with the flight attendants' addition of some Body/Comm moves, I might consider a trip to the Philippines...

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqh8e2KYIrU

I played the above clip as a warm-up for Body/Comm class on Thursday (in Globalization class, too...) and one of my students told me about the skits of Australian comedian Adam Hills. Some of his routines deal with sign language and sometimes he even uses a sign language interpreter.  In the following clip at around the 3:24 point he does a bit about a flight attendant working sign language into the safety instructions. Funny stuff.



Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O53q8MlGAFk

And here's another clip featuring Hills along with his interpreter.



Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtW-RtMJkwY

It really is nice to see how the popularity and hopefully understanding of sign language is increasing. In a recent Japan Today article it was claimed that 1.2 million people in Japan use Japanese Sign Language. There are an estimated 400,000 deaf people in Japan, so that would indicate that more hearing people use sign language than deaf people. And I would have to update the figure to 1,200,051 to include this semester's members of the JSL Study Group (51 international and Japanese students came to our first meeting!).

Another Body/Comm student recently told me about a music video by Thelma Aoyama called "Wasurenaiyo" that uses JSL. The use of JSL is a stretch and certainly a gimmick to add to the sad nature of the video. I can't include the video in this post because embedding was disabled. But you can still check it out at the following link:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUQAwbYB_-w

I am sure there is a lot of good stuff on YouTube that uses sign language. if you know of something good, please share with VAOJ.