How Many Students Does it Take to Write a Joke? Humor Writing in Composition Courses

Abstract

A s writing teachers we have serious objectives. In a limited number of weeks we want our students to feel more comfortable with the writing process, more aware of language, more flexible in the way they engage ideas, and more attentive to audience. Insofar as humor depends on unusual combinations of ideas, insofar as it hinges on unexpected meanings and associations of words and phrases, insofar as it both reveals and conceals values and triggers instantaneous responses (laughter, groaning)-it can advance these pedagogical goals. Given the widely shared interest in comedy among our students-a generation that grew up on sitcoms, standup routines, and infinitely recycled jokes-the wonder is that humor writing is not common in composition courses. Indeed, if composition pedagogy were rooted in student interest, every first-year course and advanced writing elective would include humor writing. Ask our students whom they admire more-John McPhee or Jim Carrey, Annie Dillard or Dana Carvey. And, even after we have explained who McPhee and Dillard are, most will not hesitate in choosing Carrey and Carvey. Still, rather than tapping into this energy, many English instructors tend to regard it as part of the problem-a sign of poor taste or cultural poverty-or simply as a matter that is irrelevant to academic writing. Perversely, many writing teachers behave like the unsympathetic potential lovers in Woody Allen's Annie Hall ( 1977). Noting a pun or witticism in a student paper, these chilly evaluators pause only long enough to jot a question in the margin : Pun intended? or Are you trying to be funny? Similarly, humor is ignored, discouraged, or barely tolerated in many com­ position texts and in much scholarship in the fieid. A survey of current texts reveals a seriousness of tone, a style characterized by projective and vigorous determination. Texts such as Writing as Thinking and Writing in the Disciplines, Strategies: A Rhetoric and Reader have no heading for humor in their indexes. No wonder this is so, since their titles appear to announce military campaigns or profound philosophic inquiries that, however unintentionally, bring the macho lumberjacks of the Monty Python sketch or Jack Handey of Saturday Night Live's Deep Thoughts gag to mind. In the same way, the text, Rhetoric and Style: Strategies for Advanced Writers seems to assume that advanced writers do not need to work on humor, while Writing as Revelation suggests by way of omission