To understand better how to teach comic texts, it is worth considering what comedy does, or can do, in the classroom. What learning opportunities are presented by comic texts? What does comedy teach? The humor of satire provides interesting answers to these questions. In this article, I draw on my experience teaching brief satirical news articles…[Read more]

The function of humor inside and outside technical communication and professional writing classrooms is a funny business.  A survey of the past century’s textbooks for these two subjects reveals how we have systematically institutionalized the concept that humor has virtually no place in those classrooms and by extension in the workplace.  Wit…[Read more]

Teaching American Humor on-line is a significant alternative to in-class teaching, and it offers benefits in student interaction, research potential, and academic depth and motivation. The basic concept of an on-line humor course appears in this abstract. First, humor is a social medium as much as it is a literary genre. Responses to jokes vary…[Read more]

Teaching a problematic text like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gets a lot easier if we remember that it is a masterpiece of American humor.  If we choose to go directly to the center of the controversy over the novel, it lies in racism and its realistic depiction, jokes and their “office” as humor, and, finally, at how authors themselves info…[Read more]

In this essay, I consider a course I taught in Modern Languages and Cultural Studies (MLCS), “Comedy Across Cultures.” Selected as the special topics course for Winter 2018, this class was chosen by the department because of how well the topic of comedy both drew students from a variety of majors as well as offered unique pedagogical qua…[Read more]

In the fall of 2016, I taught an honors seminar titled Standup Comedy as Social Discourse. Each week of the course focused on different comedian’s special paired with a critical article on a related topic. For example, we opened the class with George Carlin’s 1990 special, Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, and Prakash Kona’s critical article, “…[Read more]

The power of humor in processing the complexities of life can be evidenced by merely turning on the television.  Seven nights a week you can witness late night talk show hosts like Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, and Robin Thede deliver jokes to conjure laughter surrounding the grave state of our seemingly polarized country.  Comedians use humor to f…[Read more]

At Marist College, I teach James Thurber’s humorous texts as models for my college writing students to use in their own attempts at comic writing. This chapter will address the specifics of how I analyze Thurber’s texts to isolate the techniques and devices he uses to achieve humor. A mainstay of Thurber’s humor is his drawing of eccentric chara…[Read more]

Hugh Henry Brackenridge began publishing the text that became Modern Chivalry in 1792, just post-Revolutionary War.  It began as a gentlemanly pursuit designed to entertain his friends and family, and is a satire based on the earlier novel, Don Quixote.  It was published in sections and later collected into a novel form in 1819, and was r…[Read more]

Many public responses to the recent spate of blackface scandals have focused on the long, enduring history of minstrelsy. Some commentators, such as Rhae Lynn Barnes, have argued that “[p]eople have perpetuated blackface because we don’t teach minstrel history”: “If these people had ever been exposed to it in a safe classroom environment,” she a…[Read more]

In his groundbreaking book In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters brought the concept of MBWA – Management by Wandering Around – from the hallways of HP (then Hewlett-Packard) and Silicon Valley into the lexicon of everyday management in organizations around the world. The idea was intriguingly simple, and believe it or not, quite radical in its day…[Read more]

One of the most important creators of Galician comics and caricatures was Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao (1886-1950). He started developing his comic characters for the magazine “Vida gallega” (“Galician life”) in 1909, and he continued to portray the Galician peasants and fishermen while denouncing social injustices even beyond the Spanish Civil Wa…[Read more]

Political rivals often use trenchant humor against one another to expose hypocrisy, and to galvanize their own base of support.  Whether it is by labeling someone a ‘snowflake’ or re-naming someone else ‘Drumpf,’ humor can release collective tension which, left to individuals, might otherwise realize destructive expression.

This essay shall su…[Read more]

What’s funny about Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (GPB) is that the protagonist Lorelei’s ridiculous ignorance is not ultimately the target of the novel’s mockery. Composed entirely as diary entries rife with Lorelei’s laughable grammar, misspellings, confusion, and greed, the narrative punches up at male chauvinism. She is no more merc…[Read more]

Linking the performative aspects of teaching and being a student requires engagement. Idea engagement requires saying “yes” to new ideas and building upon the ideas of others. Theories of performativity such as those of Judith Butler, J.L. Austin, and Louis Althusser tell us about student/teacher roles and how they are performed socially, whi…[Read more]

The first issue of Studies in American Humor (1974) included the essay “Immigrant Stereotypes, 1880-1900,” by literary historian William R. Linneman. It discusses visual ethnic cartoons that appeared in mass-circulating magazines of the period and helped establish the template for later newspaper comic strips featuring immigrant characters: The Kat…[Read more]

The first English comic play, the late medieval morality play Mankind (1471), is contemporaneous with Everyman, and the two plays are similar in length and theme.  However, whereas Everyman is dry and tame, Mankind provides an exciting and raunchy glimpse of folk literature in late medieval England.

Mankind is as serious as it is vulgar.  The p…[Read more]

When one of the applicants to the MSc program on Mexican Contemporary Literature proposed her thesis to be on Mexican Graphic Novel, the cloister of professors were surprised at the possibility of considering “Comics”, a popular culture product, as a literary object of study. The surprise grew into amazement and disbelief when she quoted BEF, Ton…[Read more]

Foreign language educators across the country grapple with the issue of how to effectively work with students in the cultivation of high-level affective components relating to intercultural competence.  Developing students’ cognitive awareness of cultural difference as well as the linguistic, analytical and critical thinking skills required to be…[Read more]

As artifacts that speak to students with a unique and appealing voice in which cultural identities, attitudes and nuance are deeply embedded, humorous texts often have the power to communicate cultural values and perspectives in particularly poignant ways.  Authentic amateur videos available on YouTube, episodes and sketches from television…[Read more]