Sandra McKenzie

Is it possible to inject humour in this situation? I can see a real quandary developing, when the ID tries to add some levity to a course authored by one person and taught by another. Humour is, first of all, subjective. Where the ID sees a joke, the SME draws a blank and the instructor and students are just puzzled, humour is counterproductive.

And yet, and yet... humour (and I'm not necessarily talking about Big Yuk humour - sometimes just a gentle reminder that the world does not need to take itself quite so seriously!) does go such a long way in making life easier, it would be a shame to not use it.

Are there sometimes opportunities for using interactive humour - say, in mnemonics, turning an acronym into an absurd phrase, then challenging students to come up with their own silly versions? Or using puns (not so good if teaching ESL students).

Or as has been suggested, maybe emoticons come into their own here. Are theselittle smiley-faces universally recognized? Would a student in, say, Sao Paulo, recognize an a wink-and-nudge emoticon used by somebody in San Diego?

Would there be any benefit in having a conference that was dedicated to the lighter side of a subject? It seems to me that one indication that a student "gets" something is when he or she can crack a joke about it.

(Of course, as ID, you would have long since signed off on the project, so you wouldn't necessarily see the results of any effort to lighten things up, hence would have no benchmark to measure its success. More's the pity!)

Liz, I'm sorry but I only know the one line from the song. Guess we'll just have to make up our own lyrics.

Emoticons - my reaction to them is rooted in my own obstinancy, and in my own tendency towards deadpan humour. I've always thought that signalling a joke, or otherwise notating something that is supposed to be funny or light-hearted was a sure-fire way to kill a laugh. I do recognize that the Internet is a whole 'nuther animal, one in which an audience is invisible, and largley unknowable, (which is why we're having this discussion in the first place), but old habits and biases die hard.

Corrie, I love Scott Adams' formula for humour. I recently ran across another, from, of all places, Pravda. The formula, derived by a US physicist named Igor Krishtafovich, is as follows: HE = PI x C/T + BM. HE - humour effectiveness; PI - personal involvement; C - complexity of the joke; T - time spent solving the joke; BM - background mood.

According to Krishtafovich, "A sense of humor is a strong male quality. It is a sign of good intellect. Evolution stakes precisely on the intellect since a smart fellow as more chances of survival. That is why a sense of humor can be a much bigger sign of masculinity than the pumped-up muscles." Hmmm... Robin Williams vs Arnold Schwartzenegger...

I recognize Corrie's point about audiences for humour self-selecting, nevertheless, humour isn't confined to the comic pages, or to the comedy clubs. Also, Al's comment that guesswork should have no place in a serious, educational environment. I'm not sure that I agree that humour should be compartmentalized that way, that it should be restricted to "safe" environments and familiar audiences.

Maybe the question should be, "Does humour have a role to play in education?" If so, what is that role?

Elizabeth, thank you for your thoughtful response (and the Ogden Nash poem, which I have just liberated to use in my profile).

I think incorporporating a note in your introduction that humour is interspersed throughout the content, or discussing the use of jokes in the Netiquette section is an excellent idea. I know I've been told that I should use emoticons to indicate a less-than-serious comment, but I have asethetic objections to that. To me, an emoticon is a form of "dumbing down" that robs the humour of spontaneity, in my view, the very soul of wit. (In fact, I've just noticed that this board includes a suggestion that we use emoticons in our responses.)

I'm also glad you raised the issue of poltical correctness, which could be a whole seminar topic unto itself. Too often, I find, accusing someone who is offended by a joke or comment of being "pc" is a shorthand excuse for being crude or insensitive - deflecting a legitimate criticism by placing blame on the person who is offended. And yet, there is some truth tucked in there - there are the Nicely-Nicely's out there who would kill any attempt at laughter because laughter does, indeed, have a dark side -jokes frequently do hinge on someone else's ignorance, or a character flaw, or a physical attribute.

Some time ago, I ran across an "inclusive" version of Bob Dylan's classic, "Blowin' in the Wind": "... how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult." Now, not only does this version suck all the life blood out of this song, it can't even begin to be truly inclusive unless we can also find ways to incorporate everybody the line doesn't include - for example, conjoined twins who must, of necessity, walk down the road together; the incarcerated or hospitalized who can't walk down any roads at all; the parapelegic who is physically unable to walk down that road, and the innumerate who simply can't count how many roads they must walk down... And so on.

But I digress. Your larger point that most cultures have long traditions of storytelling that usually incorporate humour is a good one. And I suppose we can consider an academic discipline to be a culture - so there are algorithm jokes that mathematicians share, anthropological anecdotes that only another anthropologist could truly appreciate, and so on.

This response is already too long. So, thanks again for your response. It's given me much to think about!

and orders the biggest, most expensive lunch on the menu. When his meal arrives, he wolves it down, pulls out a pistol and plugs the waiter, then nonchalantly heads for the door without paying the bill. The bartender shouts out, ?hey, you can?t just eat our food, kill our waiter, and then leave as though nothing happened!? Panda turns to him and says, ?Sure I can. Look it up!?

Anyone who has grazed a best-seller list in the past couple of years knows what comes next: According to the bartender?s dictionary, the panda, a marsupial, ?eats shoots, and leaves?. Author and grammatical curmudgeon Lynn Truss has parlayed that punchline from a lame old joke into a lucrative publishing industry, thanks to an eager and growing market for books that take a light touch to illuminating grammatical issues.


Ah humour! Where would we be without it? Everybody loves a slapstick pratfall, a clever joke, an apt pun, or a witty rejoinder. We all remember the teacher who finally got through to us by making us laugh. Humour is a global trait of human beings.

Alas, while humour is international, jokes are culture-specific, and they don?t often translate well. Here?s an example: Three guys go deer hunting with bows and arrows. They spot a big buck and take aim. One shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the right. The second shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the left. The third, a statistician, jumps up and down yelling, "We got him! We got him!" If you?re a statistician, you might be rolling on the floor over this one. Personally, I don?t think this one is a real knee-slapper!


If you?ve ever tried to explain a joke to someone who just doesn?t get it, or had to apologize because your attempt at humour offended somebody, you know that nothing, but nothing, is as unfunny as a joke that has fizzled. Maybe somebody misread the body language that should have cued the laughter. Or mistook a pun as a literal representation of your meaning. Or there?s a cultural sensitivity that you were unaware of before unleashing a witticism that, in retrospect, was wildly inappropriate.

The easy solution is to just avoid any hint of levity. Let the facts speak for themselves, however dryly. Yet without humour, we?d all fade to grey. And some of us ? the lucky ones, I?d say ? are natural comedians who can no more resist being funny than they can resist breathing.


As a lover of bad jokes and an unrepentant maker of worse puns, I?m always up for a good laugh. But as an editor of online courses, I advise course developers to be very careful about using humour in the virtual classroom. Not infrequently, and always reluctantly, I find myself editing out material that is intended to raise a chuckle, a giggle, or a guffaw. (To avoid embarrassing anyone who might be following this seminar, I?ll refrain from giving specific examples from my current workplace).
The problem is, when you?re writing for a distributed audience, you can?t rely on the cues that would normally tell your audience that you?re being facetious. There is no body language to observe. No nuance of voice or gesture that would take the sting out of a pointed remark. And you have no way of knowing if your readers have a grasp of language sophisticated enough to discern the wordplay that lies behind a joke. The problem can be particularly acute if your audience includes ESL students.


So how do you do it? How do you incorporate humour in your presentations, whether online or face-to-face, in view of the many constraints of culture, language, and political sensibilities that we all must deal with?

For the purposes of this discussion, I?d also like to make a distinction between humour and wit, while dealing with both. I?d define humour as a more or less gentle recognition of life?s idiocies, inconsistencies, and idiosyncrasies , while wit, it seems to me, is something much more pointed and specific. But if my definitions are too restrictive, feel free to ignore them. In any case, I?d love to hear what anyone has to say on the subject!

Video is like any other media, there has to be a real reason for using it for it to be effective. I've edited too many courses where the media is just plunked in because it's available - there's little or no thought given to what purpose it serves.

Having said that, when it is used well, it can be a valuable teaching tool. As Amy said, it is most useful when there is something active to be demonstrated, or when making a comparison.

Amy sez: "These recording would require careful planning, practice, and some assured video recording and editing, however!" Well, yes. But that's precisely what LIDC is all about. We should be (and we are) producing cutting-edge media and other learning objects that can be transferable across disciplinary lines.