Shadowing practice: Johnny Knoxville on Kidnapping Brad Pitt, Having a Matching Perm with His Mom & Last Jackass Movie

This clip is a live, unscripted exchange between Jimmy Kimmel and Johnny Knoxville, the kind of english speaking practice that trains you for real conversation rather than a scripted lesson. It sits at B2, and the pace, 207 words per minute, is faster than 66 percent of the catalogue, so this is a workout for a listener who already handles slower material comfortably. The accent is American, delivered with the quick, overlapping rhythm of late night talk, which makes the clip useful for american accent training as well as for raw speaking pace.

In the stretch you see here, Kimmel introduces Knoxville with a joke about his injuries, a raccoon named Rallo wanders into the bit, someone jokes about being knocked out by whiskey backstage, and the conversation slides into Knoxville's story about being drafted, as an eight year old, onto a youth basketball team. None of it is delivered slowly for a learner. Lines land fast and guests talk over each other, which is exactly the kind of material that rewards repeating each line out loud rather than just reading it.

Three lines from the opening carry real speech features worth isolating before you shadow this line by line. The recording also contains two casual gonna contractions elsewhere in the interview, typical of unscripted American speech, though they fall outside the stretch quoted below.

• "After 26 years of being trampled, impaled, gored, cathetered, and crunched, our first guest is finally hanging up his taser for good." This opening line stacks five injury words in a row before the punchline lands, so the challenge is keeping even stress across gored and crunched without slowing down or losing the sentence's shape.
• "He just got into my whiskey backstage." The joke depends on a throwaway, deadpan delivery, said fast and flat, with no extra stress on whiskey even though it is the funniest word in the line.
• "You would catch that raccoon for us, wouldn't you?" The tag question wouldn't you rises at the end, and the whole line is a good drill for the rising intonation English speakers use to invite agreement.

Work through the opening in the order it happens, since the exchanges build on each other and the pace only increases as Kimmel and Knoxville trade lines.

• Start with "After 26 years of being trampled, impaled, gored, cathetered, and crunched, our first guest is finally hanging up his taser for good." Read it slowly first to place the stress on each injury word, then bring it up to full speed.
• Move to lines 5 through 9, the rapid "He's not dead" exchange, and practice the overlap. This is where two speakers land words almost on top of each other, which is common in everyday English conversation.
• Take "He just got into my whiskey backstage." on its own and repeat it five times, aiming for the same flat, deadpan delivery each time rather than a bigger, more theatrical one.
• Finish with "You would catch that raccoon for us, wouldn't you?" and isolate only the rising tag at the end. That is the piece most learners flatten out, and drilling it on its own is a concrete way to improve your english accent on tag questions specifically.