Comic Relief: Engaging Students through Humor Writing
In n this time of high-stakes tests and school accountability, English classrooms have been pushed to become increasingly serious places. Combining NCLB pressures with our desires to use literature to do important cultural work—such as fighting ethnic, gender, and social-class discrimination— virtually bans humor from the classroom. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. While studies on the relationship between humor and learning are mixed, there is general agreement that when used in ways directly related to material and objectives being covered, there is improvement in attention, learning, and retention. As Cheryl Nason points out, “Humor can diminish the anxiety and reduce the threatening nature of the material by changing the tone of the instructional process. By reducing anxiety, humor improves student receptiveness to alarming or difficult material, and ultimately has a positive Designer Shoes affect on test performance” (par. 12). In other words, with students for whom English class is not a natural pleasure, the use of humor can help make the classroom a more comfortable and engaging place to learn.
However, while this psychological effect is true for any content area, humor can play an even more central role in an English classroom. Many young adults admire people with a humorous wit, just as they are attracted to comic media such as SNL and The Daily Show and the performances of innumerable stand-up comedians. The popularity of many novels rests often in their use of humor— from slapstick in the Harry Potter series, to the angry ironic humor in Speak, to the self-deprecating humor of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. While many aspects of the English curriculum may lack a certain appeal for certain students, humor almost always gets an enthusiastic reception. And humor is nothing less than the careful and effective use of language. In addition, in a school climate increasingly concerned with convergent thinking and finding the right answer, humor challenges students to think divergently, creatively, and to welcome an array of possibilities (Nason).
Don’t worry—this is not an essay imploring you to learn how to be funny, delivering appropriate one-liners at the right times. In fact, the only thing my students usually find funny about me is how feeble my attempts at being funny are (“All right, class, for this next activity I’d like you to work in pairs, or apples if you’d prefer”). Rather, I’m suggesting making humor a part of curriculum itself. In general, I try to intersperse lessons in humor throughout my units, using them in part as a kind of comic relief for the serious work we do, but also for the specific skills that an exploration into humor can impart—skills in voice and style and in what I like to call “reading like a writer.” These lessons provide students with a fun way to improve as readers and writers and provide students with the rare opportunity to express their humorous sides in an increasingly serious classroom space.
To inspire laughter and learning in English classes every classroom, which along with suggestions of some of my favorite humor-based writing activities. I’ve arranged the suggested activities from simple to complex, with Designer Shoes one and two focused on crafting humorous words and phrases, three and there, I now present my ten reasons for using humor in the Beepilepsy—The sudden spasm o four focused on strategies for humorous sentences and short passages, and the remaining activities focused on longer writing assignments in various genres. While I tend to spread these throughout my curriculum, I imagine they could also work well as a unit on humor writing and/or literary humor. Cue the music, please.
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