Teaching and learning English humour, in principle and practice
Richard Hodson
Humor is playing with language, and teaching it can usefully combine authentic input with creative output for a dynamic aspect to second language classes. Richard Hodson has been researching and teaching humor for several years and shared with us some of its principles and how he uses it. Incongruity, superiority and psychic release are the accepted reasons for funniness; pedagogical credibility is based on the linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge required to teach and learn it. Some difficulties are the subject matter, i.e. recognizing and avoiding taboo topics, that it is too personal or culture specific—so that some people just don't get it-- and varying student levels, necessitating lengthy explanations that can sometimes stall the class, losing the attention of some and the interest of others so that in the end it's just not funny anymore. This is not a problem for Hodson, who concedes to being quite amusing in his classroom—while encouraging his students to be as well by modifying jokes, rewriting the endings—and evaluating each other with Likert scales of happy faces. For us, the evening was an entertaining and interesting introduction to a potentially very useful methodology.
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