A Serious Business: Teaching and Using Jokes in the Classroom
By: Jamie Emerson
The sound of nobody laughing
Years ago, I was teaching in the room next to a novice teacher, who was working with a small group of young learners of about A2 level aged 7-14. I overheard the teacher telling, and then trying to explain, a joke that I was familiar with. Some years ago, this joke was suggested as being scientifically proven to be the ‘world’s funniest joke’. I suspect this was intended as a public engagement exercise rather than genuine science, but that’s beside the point. The point is that the novice teacher, with the best of intentions, was wasting his and his students’ time by telling this particular joke to those particular students. Why? And, more to the point, what role does humour have in the language classroom anyway? Here’s the joke:
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed over. The other guy takes out his phone and calls emergency services. He says: ‘I think my friend is dead! What should I do?’ The operator says: ‘Calm down, I can help. First, make sure he’s dead.’ There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: ‘OK, now what?’
I think we can differentiate between using humour in the classroom, and teaching it. I don’t know what my next-door neighbour intended with the joke, but either way it was too difficult. We’ll look at this difficulty in more detail soon, but for now let’s keep a simple idea in mind–if a joke is too hard to teach, then it’s definitely too hard to use. The teacher’s joke was much too hard to elicit laughter, and explaining it prompted puzzlement.
Put simply, far too much knowledge of both language and of the world was required for these young, A2 level learners to ‘get’ the joke. The joke depends on two senses of the phrasal verb “make sure”. These are clearly defined in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary:
- To check that something is true or has been done–in the Two Hunters joke, this is what the operator means
- To do something in order to be certain that something else happens–this is what the hunter thinks the operator means
Phrasal verbs are inherently tricky, and the two senses of this phrasal verb are pretty similar. Plus, the joke relies on semantic knowledge of hunting and communicating with emergency services. The young learners might well not have had this knowledge. It’s unsurprising that the novice teacher’s joke fell flat.
In a reversal of the situation above, a teenage Brazilian C1 level student once told me this joke, which I enjoyed:
It was raining cats and dogs yesterday. I stepped in a poodle.
Here, the listener needs to know that ‘raining cats and dogs’ is an idiom, meaning to rain heavily. Moreover, they need to know the nouns “puddle” and “poodle”, and appreciate that they are a minimal pair, with the only difference between them being the vowel sound.
The joke is much shorter than the Two Hunters joke, relies on much more specific meanings and less knowledge of the world, but there’s still a lot to unpack for students without access to those meanings and knowledge.
The science writer Dean Burentt argues that jokes work by creating and then resolving a conflict between our expectations of a situation and an outcome that is “surprising, unexpected or wrong in some form” but in a way that is “without negative consequences”. While some jokes are visual, often the conflict is created using language. Neuroscientists Pascal Vrticka, Jessica Black and Allan Reiss suggest that, neurologically, the positive emotions associated with humour differ somewhat from other positive emotions, probably because of the satisfaction of ‘getting’ a joke.
With jokes integrating world and linguistic knowledge to produce an emotional response, it is not surprising that jokes involve networks connecting various parts of the brain, namely the temporal and frontal lobes in the cerebral cortex, according to neurologist Richard Restak. These areas “are related to speech, general information, and the appreciation of contradiction and illogicality”. Restak points out that working memory is crucial to understanding a joke, because the audience needs to keep their original understanding of a situation (a comedian would call this the set up) in mind while other alternatives are being developed or revealed (i.e., the punch line).
All of this means that jokes are inherently challenging for language learners. To benefit from the relief generated by this playful resolution, the audience needs to a) have those expectations, b) notice when they are being subverted, and c) understand that they have been resolved.
In short, jokes are a serious business. The complexities of what a joke is means that teachers need to think carefully about why to joke in the first place. This brings us to the first purpose of humour in the classroom: to teach jokes.
No laughing matter – teaching jokes
Jokes can be a source of linguistic input. Here, jokes are texts to be exploited. And because they are jokes, they are dense–a little goes a long way. The Stepped in a Poodle joke is two sentences and 12 words long, but could be the launchpad for wide-ranging language work on verb tenses (using the past progressive to establish a scenario and then the past simple to describe an event within it), idiomatic vocabulary, and pronunciation (long and short vowel shorts).
Making students laugh is not the point here. Close reading and analysis will likely sap humorous energy from the text. As the writer of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web E. B. White noted, “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” Remember: you’re simply using a concise but dense text for language work, and the text happens to be a joke.
I woke up laughing – using jokes
The second (and probably more obvious) purpose of classroom humour is to actually make people laugh. Why do this? In different studies, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar and the social psychologists Laura Kurtz and Sara Algoe have found that the presence of shared laughs in social interactions make people more positive about the interactions overall. So, focussing on the language classroom, from a social perspective laughter can create rapport with and between learners.
Meanwhile, laughter has physiological effects too. Neuroscientist Sophie Scott outlines the neurochemical effects of laughter as being reduction in stress-related hormones adrenaline and cortisol, and increases in endorphins, which are effectively an internal painkiller. Thus, in addition to social bonding, laughter gets people into a good mood and creates a pleasant break from the often difficult, tiring and sometimes stressful work of language learning.
Because classrooms bring people together, they are filled with potential laughs. Dunbar and colleagues suggest that we are four times more likely to laugh at the same comedy routine if we are among others than if we are alone.
When using jokes for the purpose of laughter, the joke itself should not be difficult and tiring (and remember that, as we saw with the Two Hunters and Stepped in a Poodle examples, jokes get difficult quickly). Generally, it’s best to avoid linguistic humour for this reason. An example: when I was training to be a teacher, I used a joke that was given to me by one of my trainers. It goes like this:
Announce to the class that, as a reward for coming first in a competitive activity, you’ll give a student some money. To illustrate, take out your wallet and make it seem like a very important object. When the students have finished and the winner has been identified, go over to them holding your wallet. Make a big show of opening it, looking for a note, and not being able to find it. Then take out a credit card and say “do you accept this?”.
Students’ use of humour
In my career, students have proved to be good at making people laugh for its own sake. A wonderful job I had in Europe involved travelling from school to school to deliver an intensive week of teaching, the climax of which was a show that students performed to their schoolmates, teachers, and sometimes their parents. For a lesson or two each day, teachers would workshop ideas with students, produce a script, and rehearse. The bits that got the biggest laughs always came from the students themselves, and were much more about their delivery than their content. Humour would be found in the intonation, stress, facial expressions and body language of the young actors.
My wife, also a language teacher, tells a story about an adult Saudi A1 learner completing a sentence stem like “In the evening, I __________” with drink whiskey. The student had a big, knowing smile on his face. He was a practicing Muslim and therefore did not drink; he was being playful.
A favourite icebreaker of mine is to write 6-8 words, phrases, and numbers scattered across the board along with some question marks. These are answers to questions about you, and students have to guess the questions. This not only builds some rapport, but also gives the teacher information about the students’ language level. Once a student has guessed a question, the teacher can then pose it to students in the class. Crucially, the activity is fairly open-ended. A word like Liverpool could be the answer to Where do you live? Where are you from? Where did you last go on holiday? What’s your favourite football team? and so on. This lends itself to humour. 1988 is the year I was born, but students have asked if it’s how old I am or if it’s the number of children I have.
Overall, these activities, ranging from full-blown class shows to everyday gap fills and icebreakers, provide a platform for students to express themselves, and some students like to express themselves in a humorous way. But the humour is incidental; you’re not constructing a lesson around it.
Bringing the two together
In over a decade, I think there was one time that I was able to combine both the ‘teaching’ and the ‘using’ approaches to jokes that I’ve outlined. It involved a step-by-step approach, first treating the joke as a text and then treating it as a joke in its own right.
The theme of the week for my B2 class was tourism, and I had found a YouTube video about a holiday to an English seaside town. I used the video as a listening text with typical ‘listening for gist’ and ‘listening for specific information’ activities. I had the screen turned off but the speakers turned on so the learners could focus on listening. After a couple of listens to complete the activities, I asked the students to discuss whether they were interested in visiting the town, and why. The students were impressed by the low prices and the vivid descriptions of the high quality restaurants, luxury hotels and fun leisure activities. After pair work and then group discussion I took a vote; all students wanted to visit the town. I then played the video on the screen.
The gag was that the video was satire; the descriptions made the place sound lovely, but the video made it look awful. Some students did find the mismatch amusing, and I saw smiles and a few giggles. (Impressively, after all these years, at the time of writing, the video is still online).
Advice
- Be clear about purpose–ask: are you aiming to teach humour or use it? Let this inform the type of humour you choose.
- Teach linguistic humour and approach it like any other text.
- Use non-linguistic or very, very simple linguistic humour if you want to make students laugh.
- Provide opportunities for students to express themselves, and humour is likely to follow.
- If jokes aren’t your thing, don’t worry. Remember that ultimately, you’re a teacher and not a comedian.
Jamie Emerson (MA, DELTA) has taught, designed, and managed English courses since 2012. He has written on whiteboards, created slides, and even designed a whole textbook while working in schools and universities in the UK, Europe, South America, and Asia. He has written for a variety of academic and trade publications and spoken at numerous conferences. He now works for Advance HE, a member-led charity for the Higher Education sector.