I’m a big fan of starting class with a joke. It gets the students settled in and on the same mental page. It can lower anxiety levels early in the semester or when you are giving or handing back tests. It can also add a little espresso to an early morning or late afternoon class. Also, if the students get used to laughing at the start of class (Tip: avoid wondering whether the students are laughing with you or at you), they will have extra motivation to come to class on time.
Example: For a Mass Communications and Society class, I borrowed and modified a joke from a comedian I saw on David Letterman the night before. “My girlfriend’s never happy. She said the other day that her grandfather used to tell her grandmother every day that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I said, “What could he know about beautiful women? Back then, they didn’t even have cable.” If you are adventurous, you can riff off of this theme. “Back then, they didn’t even have Baywatch, Spanish game shows, Desperate Housewives, (PAUSE), the Golden Girls…” You can tailor the joke, as I did, to fit your needs and situation.
Analysis (Warning: If you analyze a joke too much, it’ll stop being funny to you):
If you’ve ever had a student see you at the movies or at the mall and look at you incredulously, asking, “What are you doing here?” you know that a joke beginning with the professor talking about his or her relationship works to get the students attention because they are curious about their professors' lives outside of the classroom and probably unaware that the professors have lives off campus (if you are untenured, you probably don’t).
Series or lists of items can be funny when one of the items (often the last one) is different (like Golden Girls). The first three items are funny in their own right, they produce images of mass-produced hyper-Hollywood sex appeal, but the fourth is even funnier because of its incongruity with the previous three. Huh??? The Golden Girls??? Tip: Though I used four items in this series, there is a comedic principle that states that three is the funniest number of items in a series (see item 1A below for why I broke this “rule”).
This joke requires
- A knowledge of some television programming that corresponds with your students’ frames of reference.
A. If you are unsure what they know, add more items to the list. For example, I originally had only Baywatch and Spanish game shows before the payoff Golden Girls. But I grew afraid that the students were unfamiliar with Spanish game shows. If students are unfamiliar with one item in a two-part series, they can’t establish the pattern necessary to get the joke. I didn’t want to drop that reference though because it was funny to my many Hispanic students. So I broke the rule of threes and added “Desperate Housewives” so that more students could pick up on the Hollywood hotties pattern befor
e I got to the punchline.
B. Tip: Keep pop culture references simple and common. Students need not have actually watched any of those programs to get the joke. Commercials for—and popular references to—these shows have hopefully built up enough familiarity for students to get the joke. - Updating your humor. Warning: At some point in the future, the students may not know who the “Golden Girls” are. If you have to explain the joke, it’s not going to be funny.
- Watching a little late-night TV and listening for malleable jokes.
- A transition into the day’s material. Always try to tie the joke into the lesson or the course in general. I transitioned into a lecture on images of women in modern mass media and the way modern mass media change our self-esteem and our expectations. You can even ask what made the joke funny? What did it seem impossible that the Golden Girls could be beautiful or sexy?
a's School of Journalism and Mass Communications: "I’ve been called the 'great Satan' and, I suspect, worse. I’ve also had students run from my office gleefully screaming into their cell phones, 'Mom, I got a B!'" But the 6'4" former A.P. editor uses humor to diffuse some of the intimidation: "Sometimes I wear funny hats to class – a ball cap with a giant pencil screwed into it (yes, that’s a real working pencil and eraser), a hard hat (my favorite for 'building' headlines), a cowboy hat (useful for 'rounding up' loose sentences) and others. Sometimes I don a ghoul’s mask or that of a hockey goalie (think Jason)." Creativity is also a key. Why should editing be desk work? Fisher's editing students get out of their seats to represent words that are moved around the room by "editors." Fisher hopes his courses can "make people laugh a little, realize that editing, while serious stuff, can be fun."
