First, Sofia Vergara is an actress. Gloria is not. It’s hard enough for most people to speak with a different accent in their native language, let alone in another language. And, I agree with those posters who say that it sounded more British, which would make it even harder, given that she’s surrounded by speakers of American English.
Second, Gloria did not have time to practice, rehearse, memorize the lines, and do multiple takes to get it right. Sofia did. And yet Gloria never stumbled or hesitated, even though she was obviously very upset.
And, just curious: How many languages can you speak?
Anyway, the show didn’t have to be realistic, and it wasn’t. It was still funny, but not one of the funniest episodes.
Have you ever watched TV before? It’s a conceit of the medium that the characters speak more glibly, wittily and cattily on a consistent basis without screwups than most people do in real life.
Gloria isn’t just speaking a recently learned language. She has been speaking English for a long time and surrounded by English speakers for a long time.
She didn’t actually sound either genuinely British or American, which is what makes it realistic. It sounded like she was putting on a bad accent.
One well, a second one badly, a handful of others hardly at all.
My wife speaks four languages and she can do bad accents in all of them. It’s an ability that some people have, especially if they have been speaking multiple languages from a young age.
And I think that’s the key, Gloria was doing a bad accent. That’s completely realistic.
I expect to see strange nitpicks pop up in these threads every week, but I think you win this week. It’s not completely impossible for people to fake accents. It’s not even that uncommon. It wasn’t even a good one. You could tell Gloria was exaggerating her enunciation and speaking more like what she thinks an American accent is (the same way people on Doctor Who always use what they think is an an American accent) not a realistic one. It’s clear she just slowed her speech dramatically and emphasized syllables she normally wouldn’t. That doesn’t take a lot of hard work and practice and struggle.
I think it’s funny how nearly every Modern Family thread this season includes a variation of “not the funniest episode.” Nothing’s changed. It’s the same formula and dynamics and jokes as last season.
BTW, aside from the relative merits of Julie Bowen vs Sofia Vergara (although I prefer Sofia myself), that was a really elaborate job they did of decorating the house. Do you know anyone who goes to that kind of trouble? And the costumes and make-up was also really elaborate, especially Phil’s. Perhaps there are enough film make-up artists and costume suppliers in L.A. that people can get much better costumes than the rest of the country
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Actually, I was part of an amateur ‘haunted farm’/Halloween party last weekend, which some friends put on every year, and they really do go all out like that. The decorations, the costumes, all of it, they do it to the nines. No professional make-up artists, just a couple of us who have a knack for it and have been doing it for long enough we’ve got it down pretty well. This is a party that they start planning months in advance, so yeah, the only thing about the shows like this that I find unrealistic is the limited planning that goes into getting everything together.
(as an aside, I found the simple/basic costumes at the party on Community to be probably the most accurate portrayal of costumes for that kind of party I’ve ever seen on TV)
I think you are seriously overestimating the difficulty of badly faking an accent in a foreign language. I can (badly) imitate Southern Polish (Goral) accents, and I’ve heard foreign learners of English fake regional American accents (like Texas or Southern accents). Perhaps not everyone can do it, but it’s common enough that it doesn’t at all strike me as unrealistic.
FWIW, it was this comment by acsenray that triggered the post that you quoted: “The fact that [Sofia Vergara] was actually doing it, is proof that it is realistic.” The fact that an actor does something in a rehearsed, recorded TV show is not proof that it’s realistic for the character to do it. There are many examples of this. Easiest one: Almost every song in Glee. Little or no rehearsal by the characters, and amazing performances. Totally unrealistic, but very entertaining.
The question here, though, is whether Gloria’s accent was unrealistic, given her character. The question isn’t whether someone can do this. I’m saying that it didn’t ring true that Gloria (the character, and everything that we’ve learned about her in previous episodes) could instantly remove her Colombian accent. And, I think that Sofia Vergara had to work at it a lot more than Gloria apparently did. To me, that makes it “unrealistic” but I’m not saying that the performance flopped.
If she had just dropped into perfect idiomatic Southern California English, spoken at a reasonable pace, I’d agree with you. But she didn’t. She spoke slowly, enunciated carefully, and still got the pronunciations slightly wrong. I know more than one person who learned English as an adult and who have strong foreign accents, who can do the exact same thing. One guy is hilarious - his English gets better the drunker he gets, and yes, I once purposely stayed sober just to make sure it wasn’t observation bias.
All of my funny non-U.S. friends slip into fake U.S. accents as part of imitations, jokes, etc. I slip into non-U.S. accents (very badly) when I am making the Funny. As long as no racist or personal attack lines are being crossed, this is a super-common thing…isn’t it?
I can’t answer the first question, but for the second I assume the suit had just enough clearance for the costume. And as you recall, it didn’t really fit very well anyway. He was pretty stiff, and squeaking as he moved around and the boss kept commenting about how in shape he was.
