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Book review: Teaching Comedy

By Geoffrey Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2024. Book review: Teaching Comedy. Technical Communication 71(2):108-109.

Teaching Comedy
Bev Hogue (Ed.) 2023. Modern Language Association. [ISBN: 978-1-6032-96151. 338 pages + index. (Paperback, US$38)

A reviewer and his editor walk into a bar. “Ouch!” says the reviewer. “Sorry,” the editor replies. “We set the bar lower for reviewers”.

Despite its title, Teaching Comedy isn’t about writing jokes, though you may learn a few tricks along the way. Rather, it focuses on how comedy can teach students to think about key aspects of communication such as audience and context. Comedy interests, attracts, and motivates students. As editor Bev Hogue notes, “Comedy can build community, ease personal and shared pain, and enhance connections among cultures” (p. 2). Comedy has “a concern for subverting cultural norms and holding up to the world a fun-house mirror that may be distinctly unfunny” (p. 4). As in satire, mirrors can produce distorted reflections, with the distortion itself part of the message.

An academic text on humor challenges the maxim that the easiest way to kill a joke is to dissect it. Teaching Comedy sidesteps that fate by showing teachers how to use comedy (from stand-up routines to novels) to reveal universal truths, such as the importance of an audience’s context (history, power structures, racism). Though humor’s culturally bound, understanding it also requires genre knowledge: comedy has its own vocabulary, jargon, and structural conventions. For example, most comedy begins with a mise en scène to establish the abovementioned context. Technical communicators from all genres can learn much about identifying the context required for communication to succeed. Teaching Comedy also reveals the pitfalls of cross-cultural communication with diverse audiences and how to mitigate the problem. Many chapters describe a teacher’s first-time journey learning how to teach comedy, and include tips, tricks, and pitfall warnings. Authors emphasize modern pedological techniques, such as facilitating and guiding rather than controlling the discourse, and encouraging students to work together to explore and discuss the material and learn from each other’s insights.

Hogue doesn’t establish consistent terminology for all contributors, so there’s occasional confusion that results when contributors discuss different things under the same name or the same thing under different names. Humor is neither comedy nor satire; rather, each borrows from the others. I’d have preferred to see these terms established and used consistently. Unfortunately, there are no visuals to make descriptions of humor’s visual aspects concrete, and few Web links to videos or audio. Ironically, there are few examples of actual humor, leading to many abstract descriptions that should have been grounded in example, particularly for subjects such as “graphic novels” that unite text with illustration.

Teaching Comedy is mostly light on jargon, with exceptions such as “Problem based learning framework informed by health and environmental humanities and post-colonial cultural studies” (p. 90). But with a little work, even non-academics will learn something. Humor encourages us to think more deeply—a skill that can be applied far more widely than just for teaching comedy. Hogue’s book will inspire you to apply that skill.