Stand-up for freshmen: the risky bets and high rewards of stand-up comedy in the writing classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper will highlight two specific risks that humour and laughter present for the writing classroom: the risk of instructors coming across as ‘non-serious’ and the risk of students becoming offended. By bringing up these risks, I do not pretend to have concrete solutions to them. Quite the contrary. Like early rhetoricians, I’ll highlight some strategies and approaches that have been fruitful for me in practice, but my intention here is to invite risk into the classroom as risk. Because laughter interrupts the human subject, showing us the limits of any rational pursuit designed to contain it, appeals to laughter are inherently risky. Quite often, we can’t control what we find funny nor what we are offended by, yet we can use our emotional reactions to humour – those that lie outside of our rational control – to ask broader rhetorical questions about why language produces the effects that it does. Laughter, because its effects are often felt before they are conceptually interpreted, is an amplified reminder that language is not a technology that simply transmits meaning across an absence, but a force that breaks from context, producing rhetorical effects that often lie beyond the bounds of reason and intention.