Humor in the Classroom provides practical, research-based answers to questions that educational researchers and language teachers might have about the social and cognitive benefits that humor and language play afford in classroom discourse and additional language learning. The book considers the ways in which humor, language play, and creativity can construct new possibilities for classroom identity, critique prevailing norms, and reconfigure particular relations of power. Humor in the Classroom encourages educational researchers and language teachers to take a fresh look at the workings of humor in today’s linguistically diverse classrooms and makes the argument for its role in building a stronger foundation for studies of classroom discourse, theories of additional language development, and approaches to language pedagogy.
The language barrier is a familiar term, but what exactly is the humor barrier? Humor is a universal phenomenon, but the cultural variance in how humor is used can prove to be a major obstacle for English language learners hoping to communicate effectively in cross-cultural contexts. While a growing number of researchers have explored the importance of helping language learners better understand the humor of the target culture, in Bridging the Humor Barrier: Humor Competency Training in English Language Teaching, editors John Rucynski Jr. and Caleb Prichard bring together language teachers and researchers from a range of cultural and teaching contexts to tackle how to actually overcome the humor barrier. This book empirically examines humor competency training and presents related research bearing implications for humor training. Contributors address a wide range of genres of humor, providing fresh insights into helping language learners deepen their understanding and appreciation of the humor of the English-speaking world, including jokes, sarcasm, and satire. This book is an excellent resource for English language teachers looking to help their learners avoid the pitfalls and reap the benefits of humor in the target language.
Few people associate law books with humor. Yet the legal world--in particular the American legal system--is itself frequently funny. Indeed, jokes about the profession are staples of American comedy. And there is actually humor within the world of law too: both lawyers and judges occasionally strive to be funny to deal with the drudgery of their duties. Just as importantly, though, our legal system is a strong regulator of humor. It encourages some types of humor while muzzling or punishing others. In a sense, law and humor engage a two-way feedback loop: humor provides the raw material for legal regulation and legal regulation inspires humor. In Guilty Pleasures, legal scholar Laura Little provides a multi-faceted account of American law and humor, looking at constraints on humor (and humor's effect on law), humor about law, and humor in law. In addition to interspersing amusing episodes from the legal world throughout the book, the book contains 75 New Yorker cartoons about lawyers and a preface by Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor for the New Yorker.
Humor, wit, and laughter surround each person. From everyday quips to the carefully contrived comedy of literature, newspapers, and television we experience humor in many forms, yet the impetus for our laughter is far from innocuous. Misfortune, stupidity, and moral or cultural defects, however faintly revealed in others and ourselves, seem to make us laugh. Although discomforting, such negative terms as superiority, aggression, hostility, ridicule, or degradation can be applied to instances of humor. According to scholars, Thomas Hobbes's "superiority theory"?that humor arises from mischances, infirmities, and indecencies, where there is no wit at all?applies to most humor. With the exception of good-natured play, Charles R. Gruner claims that humor is rarely as innocent as it first appears.Gruner's proposed superiority theory of humor is all-encompassing. In The Game of Humor, he expands the scope of Hobbes's theory to include and explore the contest aspect of "good-natured" play. As such, the author believes all instances of humor can be examined as games, in terms of competition and keeping score?winners and losers. Gruner draws on a broad spectrum of thought-provoking examples. Holocaust jokes, sexual humor, the racialist dialogue of such comic characters as Stepin Fetchit and Archie Bunker, simple puns, and many of the author's own encounters with everyday humor. Gruner challenges the reader to offer a single example of humor that cannot be "de-humorized" by its agonistic nature.The Game of Humor makes intriguing and enjoyable reading for people interested in humor and the aspects of human motivation. This book will also be valuable to professionals in communication and information studies, sociologists, literary critics and linguists, and psychologists concerned with the conflicts and tensions of everyday life.
An ideal resource for organizational scholars, students, practitioners, and human resource managers, this handbook covers the full spectrum of organizational theories and outcomes that define, explain, and predict the occurrence, causes, and consequences of positivity.
This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to exploring humor in the academic world. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives and practical orientations in the disciplines of Linguistics, Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation, but all concerned with the interactional aspects of humor. The two main reasons behind the publication of this volume are, first, to continue the journey along the path towards full recognition of humor as a discipline worthy of research and assessment, and, second, to offer a new and integrating perspective on hu¬mor to showcase the wide range of dimensions that it offers. This book is sure to become an important reference and source of inspiration for scholars in the various subfields of Humor Studies: Linguistics, Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation.
By exploring the works of both Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Søren Kierkegaard, Lydia B. Amir finds a rich tapestry of ideas about the comic, the tragic, humor, and related concepts such as irony, ridicule, and wit. Amir focuses chiefly on these two thinkers, but she also includes Johann Georg Hamann, an influence of Kierkegaard's who was himself influenced by Shaftesbury. All three thinkers were devout Christians but were intensely critical of the organized Christianity of their milieux, and humor played an important role in their responses. The author examines the epistemological, ethical, and religious roles of humor in their philosophies and proposes a secular philosophy of humor in which humor helps attain the philosophic ideals of self-knowledge, truth, rationality, virtue, and wisdom.
In this innovative book, David E. Low examines the multifaceted role of humor in critical literacy studies. Talking about how teachers and students negotiate understandings of humor and social critique vis-à-vis school-based critical literacy curriculums, the book co-examines teachers’ and students’ understandings of humor and critique in schools. Critical literacy centers discussions on power and social roles but often overlooks how students use transgressive humor as a means to interrogate power. Through examples of classroom interactions and anecdotes, Low analyzes the role of humor in classroom settings to uncover how humor interplays with critical inquiry, sensemaking, and nonsense-making. Articulated across the fields of literacy studies and humor studies, the book uses ethnographic data from three Central California high schools to establish linkages and dissonances between critical literacy education and adolescents’ joking practices. Adopting the dialectic of punching up and punching down as a conceptual framework, the book argues that developing more nuanced understandings of transgressive humor presents educators with opportunities to cultivate deeper critical literacy pedagogies and that doing so is a matter of social justice. Essential for scholars and students in literacy education, this book adds to the scholarship on critical literacy by exploring the subversive power of humor in the classroom.
Farce has always been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of dramatic genres. Distinctions between farce and more literary comic forms remain clouded, even in the light of contemporary efforts to rehabilitate this type of comedy. Is farce really nothing more than slapstick-the "putting out of candles, kicking down of tables, falling over joynt-stools," as Thomas Shadwell characterized it in the seventeenth century? Or was his contemporary, Nahum Tate correct when he declared triumphantly that "there are no rules to be prescribed for that sort of wit, no patterns to copy; and 'tis altogether the creature of imagination"? Davis shows farce to be an essential component in both the comedic and tragic traditions. Farce sets out to explore the territory of what makes farce distinct as a comic genre. Its lowly origins date back to the classic Graeco-Roman theatre; but when formal drama was reborn by the process of elaboration of ritual within the mediaeval Church, the French term "farce" became synonymous with a recognizable style of comic performance. Taking a wide range of farces from the briefest and most basic of fair-ground mountebank performances to fully-fledged five-act structures from the late nineteenth century, the book reveals the patterns of comic plot and counter-plot that are common to all. The result is a novel classification of farce-plots, which serves to clarify the differences between farce and more literary comic forms and to show how quickly farce can shade into other styles of humor. The key is a careful balance between a revolt against order and propriety, and a kind of Realpolitik which ultimately restores the social conventions under attack. A complex array of devices in such things as framing, plot, characterization, timing and acting style maintain the delicate balance. Contemporary examples from the London stage bring the discussion u
