Videos for The Classroom: John Cleese on Soccer vs. Football

I found this on my friend Mark Himmelsbach’s blog–titled, oddly enough, the Himmelsblog.  It shows British comic actor John Cleese from “Monty Python” fame in a clip from the documentary The Art of Football from A to Z.  In this clip, Cleese explains his own theories behind the difference between soccer and football, thus drawing a comparison between British and American culture in general.

This is a great clip to use in high school classrooms, even in upper elementary classes as well.  Some questions for further discussion:

(1) Do you find Cleese comparison of football to “advertising jingles” and soccer to “jazz” accurate?

(2) What is Cleese ultimate assumptions about American culture, based on this clip?

(3) Is he accurate about those assumptions?

(4) What assumptions do we make about British, or even European, society and culture?  Why do we make such assumptions?

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

One response to “Videos for The Classroom: John Cleese on Soccer vs. Football

  1. I feel like a stupid American now. Thanks…. Hey! HE’S one to talk about being stupid — I’ve seen Monty Python! Hmph!!! Take THAT, Mr. Cleese!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s