Teaching Comedy
- Editor: Bev Hogue
- Pages: 338
- Published: 2023
- ISBN: 9781603296151 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603296144 (Hardcover)
![Cover image for Teaching Comedy](jpg/45b64cd691cc-1962763161.jpg)
From Shakespeare to The Simpsons, comedy has long provided both entertainment and social commentary. It may critique cultural values, undermine authority, satirize sacred beliefs, and make room for the marginalized to approach the center. Comedy can be challenging to teach, but in the classroom it can help students connect with one another, develop critical thinking skills, and engage with important issues.
The essays in this volume address a rich variety of texts spanning film, television, stand-up, cartoons, and memes as well as conventional literary works from different places and times. Contributors offer theoretical foundations and practical methods for a broad range of courses, including guidance on contextualizing the humor of historical works and on navigating the ways that comedy can both subvert and reinforce stereotypes. Finally, the volume argues for the value of comedy in difficult times, as a way to create community and meaning.
Acknowledgments (ix)
Introduction: “Defender of the Faith” and the Comedy Teacher’s Conundrum (1)
Part I: Contextualizing Comedy as a Key to Culture
Comedy across Cultures: A Layered Approach to Cultural Studies, Critical Thinking, and Community Engagement (13)
A Right to Be Hostile: Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks at a Historically Black College or University (21)
Charles W. Chesnutt, Joel Chandler Harris, and the Minstrel Show Legacy (30)
Blackface in the Comedy Class (38)
No Laughing Matter: Immigrant Cartoons of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (46)
Humor and Intercultural Empathy: Teaching Comedic Films of Intercultural Encounter (55)
Laughing Prejudices Away: Teaching Diversity through Jokes in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Poetry (64)
Dark Laughter and Sexual Trauma in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (73)
Who’s Stupid? Teaching Histories with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (82)
Intercultural Critique of Subalternization: Parody in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (90)
Diverse Political Comedy Television in the Classroom (99)
Translating Trevor: Relatability and the Loss of Aesthetic Appreciation for a Joke (105)
Laughing at Belief: The Risks and Rewards of Satire in the Classroom (113)
Calvin and Hobbes in the English Foreign Language Classroom (121)
Part II: Communicating with Comedy throughout the Curriculum
From Plato to Python: Designing an Introduction to Humor Course (133)
For Better or for Worse: A Marriage of Humor and Comedy (141)
Transitioning with Laughter: Comedy in the First-Year Seminar (150)
Stand-Up Comedy, Central Questions, and Databases (159)
Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening in a Developmental Writing Course (168)
Comedy in the First-Year Writing Classroom (176)
Consume, Converse, Create: Stand-Up and Sketch Comedy in the Classroom (184)
Using Comics to Teach Analytical Writing (193)
Teaching Long-Form Analytical Writing Using YouTube (201)
Absurdist Television in the Writing Classroom (208)
Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman-Palladino, and a Pretty, Perfect Pilot (216)
Learning through Failure: Workplace Comedy in the Professional and Technical Communication Classroom (224)
A Formalist Approach to the Comic (234)
Mankind, the First English Comedy: A Long-Overlooked Teaching Option (242)
Using Comic Insults as an Approach to Shakespeare (251)
Performing Equivocating Sententiousness in Shakespeare’s Othello (258)
The Changing of the Joke: Restoration Libertine Sex Comedies (266)
Modern Chivalry and Satire: Why Teach a Post–Revolutionary War Novel? (275)
Comedy versus Satire in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (282)
The Sincerest—and Most Fun—Form of Flattery: Imitation as Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Comic Texts (290)
The Importance of Failing at Teaching The Importance of Being Earnest (298)
How to Laugh for the Future (306)
Part III: Resources (313)
Afterword: Teaching Comedy during COVID-19 (319)
Notes on Contributors (323)