Using Humor to Teach and Learn Creatively

Institute for Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts 2011

Tony CicconeUniversity of Wisconsin- Milwaukee

Humor: a couple of important ideas

Main theory: Incongruity resolution

• Three parts:

– Cognitive: what’s going on here?

– Emotional: the feeling of amusement – superiority, relief, satisfaction

– Physiological: laughter

Humor in the classroom

Humor and the creativity it is based on make teaching and learning more engaging and enjoyable.

– Humor lowers the affective filter (especially self-deprecating humor)

– Humorous stories that make a point about a concept improve retention (caveat: students often remember the story and not the concept)

– Humor builds community

– “It is physically impossible to laugh and snore at the same time.”(Robert Berk, Humor as an Instructional Defribrillator.)

Humor in the classroom

Humor and the creativity it is based on actually improve learning.

• Indirect, self-report: High “humor orientation” students reported learning more with a high HO teacher

• The opposite is true: Declines in cognitive ability correlate with reduced ability to understand humor

• Humor facilitates thinking by blocking negative emotions such as anger and by encouraging detachment (vs. getting lost in the problem)

• The humorous frame of mind puts us on the lookout for unusual ideas and new ways of putting ideas together (Morreall, and others)

• Understanding humor (“getting it”) is similar to the learning process (“ha ha//Ah ha”)

• Experiencing and creating humor improves the ability to do/see things differently and do/see different things

Humor in the classroom

Humor and the creativity it is based on improve the study of teaching and learning.

• Seeing/doing/studying familiar things differently

• Seeing/doing/studying different, unfamiliar things

What we’ll do today

• Research summary

• Control question

• Experience humor (Robin Williams, Inside the Actor’s Studio)

• Create humor (cartoon captioning)

• Reflect on humor, teaching and learning, and the study of teaching and learning

Testing the Hypothesis

Control question:

How can we make learning more likely to occur in our classrooms, courses, and institutions?

Write as many ideas as you like.

Experiencing Humor: Example

Robin Williams, Inside the Actor's Studio

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Questions

• “What the hell is going on?”

• Or what and how is Robin Williams teaching us about humor?

Creating humor

Back to control question

What would happen if…?

What would teaching and learning, and the study of teaching and learning, look like if we took these ideas about humor and creativity seriously?

• Creative language (and thinking) resists the inexorable march toward the obvious

• “The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt” that invites systematic inquiry. (John Dewey)

• “To be playful and serious at the same time … defines the ideal mental condition.” (John Dewey)

• The opposite of creativity is the mechanical and the perception of the mechanical where we expect the living is what makes something funny (Henri Bergson)

• The search for incongruity and critical thinking

Some final thoughts from students

• My thinking has changed in the way that I will not think about how things appear on the surface. There is a lot more to the world, and thinking outside the box will give me insights into it.

• I have learned that you can never discuss, analyze, listen,

comprehend, and reflect enough to really understand the meaning of something.

• At first it seemed really complex and I just couldn’t get a

good handle on it, but now I feel like I get it. “Getting it” makes you laugh. I like how I “get” why I laugh.