Bill: in Analyzing Humor, Students Will Unavoidably Uncover the Connection Between Oppressed

Chapter 14

Bill: In analyzing humor, students will unavoidably uncover the connection between oppressed groups and popular jokes. The Language prompt on stereotypes will open some perhaps uncomfortable moments in the classroom, but I think it is essential to move in this direction, especially if students are interested in Assignment Option # 3. I like to open up the classroom to jokes. I ask every student to write down one that they’ve heard and remembered well enough to repeat. Much of the humor inundating our students’ lives involves homophobia, sexism, or racism, as I hinted at in the Overview. Such humor threatens a safe zone. To keep the safe zone intact, an instructor might limit the students to writing down jokes that target features of themselves, as most of them will have heard, at the very least, gender-based jokes that they could use. But the instructor could also open a dialogue with the students about how to approach this topic without causing anyone tremendous discomfort. I’ve used this technique successfully before by explaining to students that learning is not always safe, that we must risk something in the classroom for it to mean something in their lives. If students have to self-censor at a topical level, the safety created simply obfuscates ideology rather than creating true safety. I suggest that safety comes after a group or community resolves conflicts, so we usually agree that when we share, whether in small groups or in whole class discussion, our goal is understanding. I remind students that they selected the topic and that we can choose another topic if they would like. I have yet to have a student object or demand clean language, and I don’t think the safety zone has ever been compromised. Much of this caution takes some of the humor out of the jokes, which is interesting to analyze in itself, but we still laugh at jokes—in spite of ourselves—and we can see what the jokes mediate. Instructors can then talk about the function of stereotypes and move to the assignment.

John: I’d be curious about how hard it is for students to come up with jokes that don’t hit a certain segment of the population in some way. This could lead to further discussions about what joke tellers/writings are assuming about a society and how those assumption might affirm, challenge, or change attitudes that buttress stereotypes. I’d be interested if students could see jokes as things that want listeners on board in regard to a certain belief or attitude.

One thing to examine here would not just be the content of the joke, but the situation and rhythm of a (so-called) humorous moment. Can a statement be funny, for instance, regardless of the content if it’s said at the right pitch and time? I think audience’s laughing at such moments can suggest as much a desire for community as they might an indication of a joke’s humor. Laughter can also suggest affection for the joke telling, an agreement that the person is likeable and witty, even if what that person has just said isn’t so humorous. And it can also, of course, be a sign of the audience having been conditioned.