I assigned Trevor Noah’s beautifully written memoir about his South African childhood, Born a Crime, in my 100-level American studies class focused on the topic of “Migrant Stories,” in order to both challenge, and deepen, my students’ familiarity with this late-night show host and comedian. However, the humor in the memoir is episodic, and it…[Read more]

For the past fifteen years, I have taught in a first-year humanities program on the “Great Books” model. I regularly make comedy a substantial part of my courses. I refer to comedy here as a genre as well as a worldview. In comedies, people pursue happiness and those who oppose them receive comeuppance. The good life is possible with the right bal…[Read more]

Teaching comedy can lead down a prickly path given the complexity of comedy’s definition, genre and purpose.  To compound this complexity, theorists often conflate “comedy” with “humor,” at times using them loosely as synonyms and at other times transmogrifying them into distant relatives.  To date, both have been defined as “anything a…[Read more]

In the nearly twelve years of teaching at my Master’s comprehensive public Midwestern institution, I have attempted to teach Oscar Wilde’s most famous 1895 society comedy numerous times, and in different contexts. The outcome is always the same in a Master’s seminar on late-Victorian literature and culture; in an advanced gradu…[Read more]

Science fiction has a plethora of generic conventions, such as future settings, alternative time lines, otherworldly locations, dystopic political systems/social structures, apocalyptic visions, contradictory scientific principles (such as time travel, wormholes), boundary-crossing characters (aliens, mutants, androids), dangerous technologies (or…[Read more]

Aaron McGruder’s A Right to be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, a collection of 800 comic strips from his syndicated daily comic The Boondocks, takes its title from one strip where the protagonist of the series, 10-year-old Huey Freeman, tells his grandfather, Granddad, “I got a right to be hostile, man … My people’s been persecuted!!” (57; emph…[Read more]

In eliminating our stand-alone developmental education (remedial) classes, my institution was ahead of the national trend described by Katherine Mangan in The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 18, 2019. With many students still in need of additional support, the solution was to add a lab component to our existing Rhetoric I class. After a…[Read more]

This essay presents evidence of a course that was successful in combining the standard college composition course with the viewing and analysis of television comedies. The course, offered at LSU in the 2018 spring semester and titled “English 2000: Absurdist Comedies and Cultural Commentary,” examined current cultural issues as they are rep…[Read more]

On many campuses, the first-year seminar is notoriously difficult to teach as it often requires instructors to balance delivering specific content while helping students broadly with transition issues. At Franklin Pierce University, for example, instructors of the 3-credit FYI seminar are asked to develop course topics that are engaging for first…[Read more]

My contribution focuses on a neglected area of research, newspaper comics for foreigners. The brevity and ineluctable humor of newspaper comic strips make them a favorite medium of international communication for non-English readers all over the world. As such they are a particularly apt medium to be used in the EFL classroom.

The Funnies of…[Read more]

Conversation of contemporary comedy engages students in the classroom while also emphasizing the skills needed by first-year writers to succeed as thorough analysts and efficient presenters of compelling argument. The use of funny visual advertisements, scripted or live podcasts, goofy film trailers, sitcoms, and feature-length comedies can all be…[Read more]

My essay will be a mix of Enlightenment history and theory that will attempt to distill into the several thousand word format the thoughts on “comic tone” that go back to my dissertation work on Erasmus Darwin and his strange heroic couplet poems, very popular at the time, that used the conceit of plant sexuality to help his readers deal with the…[Read more]

Philosophers have long recognized comedy’s role in responding to the “serious” or the tragic. In the Symposium, Plato advocates for genres of writing that are simultaneously tragic and comic. He approves of Aristophanes’ comic treatment of a serious topic, but suggests, through Socrates’ response to Agathon, that an emotionally serious response…[Read more]

A joke can be the venom poisoning a society with allegations of supremacy and pretexts of aggression or the antidote treating a culture from the delusions of inferiority and presumptions of submissiveness. Throughout human history, jokes have functioned as a remedy, weapon and shield enabling humans to challenge norms, subdue biases, deconstruct…[Read more]

Students have long found the smutty comedies of the English Restoration to be funny-on-first-read, different from earlier historical comedies that tend to be opaque to students until the joke is explained. But the experience of teaching libertine comedy has changed significantly in the last decade as students have become more attuned to the…[Read more]

In this essay I draw on my experience teaching English Renaissance comedy to university students at various levels of proficiency. My claim is that in order to grasp the nature of comic plays from the early modern period (though what I have to say goes for many comedies from other historical contexts, too), a formalistic perspective is more…[Read more]

A number of television shows are annually released on a variety of platforms: Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Netflix, basic cable, YouTube. More specifically, political comedy shows are finding a niche in our 21st century world because of this democratized production and access. That means that we are not just seeing the many iterations of White…[Read more]

When faced with a required, general education writing class, many students cannot help but groan at the prospect of studying the torrid act once again. There is one way to spark some excitement in students’ eyes in these writing classes: picking an object of study that is accessible, interesting, and enjoyable. Comedy is an especially poignant o…[Read more]

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), widely taught in American schools, has been parodied many times in the US, the United Kingdom, and, increasingly, around the world, in various popular cultural forms (Moyne). The proposed chapter engages a neglected, intercultural parody of Longfellow’s poem in Ugandan writer Okot…[Read more]

An almost lost art, classical imitation can be reclaimed in the context of courses that focus on (an almost lost segment of the canon) eighteenth-century British literature. Creating an imitation can teach students to appreciate literary style—and to approach texts from a remote era with confidence and mastery.

In former decades, I have a…[Read more]