Editors of Humor in America
As many of us prep our syllabi and get ready to head back to school, some of our readers will be so lucky as to get to teach humor to their students–either in a specifically focused class or in a more general context. One of the founding goals of this website was the importance of the pedagogical discussion of humor. Amy Wright, Laura Hernandez-Ehrisman, and Tracy Wuster discussed some of these issues in An Educated Sense of Humor.
Our writers have taken on a number of topics related to teaching humor. Sharon McCoy and Tracy Wuster have both take up E.B. White’s famous saying about humor and dissecting a frog (here, here, and here). Jeff Melton and Sharon McCoy have written on teaching satire:
Teaching the Irony of Satire (Ironically)
Embracing the Ambiguity and Irony of Satire: A Response to Jeff Melton
Teaching American Satire: A New Piece for the Classroom from the Onion
Jeff has also started a series about teaching humor:
Teaching American Sitcoms: Ode to The Beverly Hillbillies
Teaching American Sitcoms: Shall We Gather Round the Table?
What is Funny: Using Surveys in Teaching Humor
Teaching American Humor: What Should Be Taught?
Laughing with Laugh Tracks
The BCS of American College Football Humor
To which we could add Sharon McCoy’s pieces:
Teaching Humor with Multicultural Texts; Teaching Multiculturalism with Humor
If I Hear it Again, I Swear I’ll Scream: Hemingway, Huck Finn, and “Cheating”
Poetry Corner–Paul Laurence Dunbar: Changing the Joke to Slip the Yoke
Other pieces on the site aren’t specifically focused on pedagogy, but they do touch on related questions. Tom Inge’s Politics and the American Sense of Humor launched the website just over 2 years (and 185k views) ago. Michael Kiskis’s The Critics Dream Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also helped launch our site. Both pieces offer insight into the cultural roles of American humor, and both have proved to be popular over the course of the site’s life.
In perusing the list of pieces on the site over these last two years, there are too many strong discussions of humor to list here. Pieces of interest in relation to teaching humor might be:
The Muppets: An Exercise in Humorous Metacinematic Irony by Michael Purgason
REMEMBERING DICK GREGORY by Sam Sackett
Humor, Irony and Modern Native American Poetry by Caroline Sposto
Five Subjects Behind: Some thoughts on grunge, time machines, and “Clam Chow-Dah!” by Tracy Wuster
The Funny Thing about Cancer by Sharon McCoy
Parody: A Lesson by Don and Alleen Nilsen
Studying Stephen Colbert: Nation, who is the most important humorist of the day? by Tracy Wuster
The Onion and How Comedy Deals with Tragedy (Or Not) by Matthew Daube
Meta-Racist Airplane Jokes: The Foolish Audience and Didactic Humor by Philip Scepanski
The Mount Rushmore of Mount Rushmores by ABE
Humor Studies: An Interview with Don Nilsen
Mojo Medicine: Humor, Healing and the Blues by Matt Powell
The Pitfalls of Activist Humor by Bonnie Applebeet
Power Girl and Girl Power (Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bombshell) by David B. Olsen
In the Archives: Mr. Dooley in Peace and War, “On the Indian War” by Luke Deitrich
And so many others… if you wish to write something about humor and learnin’, please write the editor. We’d love to have more.