Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get back to work. Check back tomorrow at 1 p.m. for another one.

Stand-up comic John Branyan found reading classic literature hard — especially when it comes to a writer such as Shakespeare, whose working vocabulary was, reportedly, 54,000 words, while we contemporary Americans make do with, like, six, and four of those are “really?” “damn,” “like” and “y’know?”

Branyan imagined it’d be hard even to recite a fairy tale to a 17th-century child because the kid would be more fluent in English. But he decided to give it a shot — thusly.