Writing Center Staff

No Laughing Matter: Humor and the Writing Center
Flannery Amdahl
April 2003

One of the first things I noticed after deciding to write my paper on humor in the writing center is that the topic itself is not funny. It’s similar to trying to explain why a joke is funny: once the humor mechanism is described, the desire to laugh usually disappears. Also, most of the humor in the writing center is situational and anything else can seem a bit too contrived. Richard Shade’s book License to Laugh, for example, recommends using silly accents or bringing in funny cartoons to the classroom or writing center (10). An article that appeared in the New Yorker last year suggests that any word with the letter “k” in it is funny. The word cupcake, for example, is funny; tomato is not (Friend 90). However, I discovered that although most writers cannot provide an easy formula for how to become an instantly hilarious tutor, many writers have addressed why humor is helpful in the writing center.

Not everyone believes that humor has a place in the writing center. The purpose of tutorials is of course not to entertain the students, but to teach them useful things about writing. Some tutors believe that the use of humor belittles the tutorial or can be seen as derisive to the student. Because writing is so personal, students can be very sensitive about what they bring into the writing center. Steve Sherwood writes in his essay “Humor and the Serious Tutor,” “Helping people improve their writing is serious business…and tutors who resort to humor risk much” (48).

Many tutors, however, believe that humor can help relax anxious students and form more of a connection between tutor and student. Butch Fanale, a professional tutor at Pitt, said he tries to be funny because it “humanizes the tutoring.” A tutor who uses humor might serve as more of a collaborator, while an all-business approach tends to make the tutor appear as more of a teacher and superior. While in some cases tutors might want to seem more like a teacher (for example, when helping English as a second language students with their grammar), collaborative learning can often help students come to their own conclusions about how to revise a paper’s structure or theme. Even Sherwood claims, “A writing center without humor can be a grim, fearful place, and we must not disregard the role humor can play in facilitating interactive learning” (49).

I noticed how laughter can ease both tutor and student anxiety the very first time I tutored. The student I worked with was from China and spoke very little English. I was nervous because it was my first time tutoring by myself and I didn’t know how I could make him understand me. The student wanted me to proofread several letters of recommendation for him. He had written them themselves, but in the voices of his former bosses and professors and they said things such as, “John is brilliant and the most exceptional leader I have ever met.” I’m sure I probably should have said something about him making up the quotes, but I just ended up explaining the same grammar point over and over again as he kept pulling out letter after letter out of his book bag. He stayed for over an hour and came back a several times. The third time he came, though, he made some sort of joke and it changed the entire mood. I can’t even remember what he said now, but I remember how much more relaxed and friendly the atmosphere was from then on. He started talking more, and I was motivated to try to explain things more clearly.

Humor can create a bond between the tutor and student, strengthening the collaborative relationship. When laughter is shared, it often shows that two people are equals and as amusing experiences are shared over time, people grow closer to each other and build trust. According to Richard Shade, “A sense of security and even increased self-confidence may result from group laughter, as this is almost always an emotionally positive experience” (3). In addition to unleashing creativity, humor can also ease fears about coming to the center and anxiety about writing. Laughter can ease fear of writing and writer’s block that comes from parental pressure, deadlines, grades, fear of failure. Some students might be afraid of the writer center in general because of social anxieties, such as fear of authority figures (the tutors), fear of rejection or fear of disapproval (Sherwood 51).

However, collaboration occurs only when the student and tutor are laughing together (or to quote an old cliché, the tutor must laugh with, not at the student). According to some philosophers, humor is essentially mean spirited: we laugh when we feel superior to someone else. In the Medieval Ages, dwarves and hunchbacks were used as court jesters and a 1976 study found that when people were asked to characterize comedians, people often said “skinny,” “fat,” “ugly,” “clumsy,” stupid,” “weird” or “deformed” (Friend 80). Mark Twain once said, “Everything is funny as long as it happens to someone else” (16).

This type of humor, which falls under the “superiority theory” of humor, allows people to inflate their own egos or deflate those individuals or institutions that they feel superior to. Plato, Aristotle and Descartes all believed that people think it’s funny to pick on those less fortunate than them (Shade 13). This type of humor is, of course, very dangerous in the writing center. According to German philosopher Schopenhauer, “the laughter of others at what we do or say seriously offends us” because it announces “how incongruous were the conceptions [we] cherished with the reality which is now revealing itself” (Sherwood 49). Sherwood writes about one peer tutor, who after reading a passage of a student’s paper, laughed and said flippantly, “Well, this doesn’t make any sense at all!” The student cut off the tutorial quickly and did not return to the writing center. The tutor might have thought she was being funny, but the student was hurt (50). Unfortunately, Sherwood never saw the offended student return to the writing center.

Another theory is that the student might use humor as a way to gain superiority over the tutor. One student I tutored taunted me for my inability to pronounce Latin words related to Roman granaries. He became somewhat vicious because I didn’t know about Roman agriculture. I wasn’t offended, but I noticed that throughout the tutorial he ignored my suggestions, even though his paper needed to be completely restructured. Maybe I am jumping to conclusions, but I got the impression that he didn’t want to come to the writing center in the first place because he had trouble with writing, and he made fun of me to make himself feel better. Sherwood explains one way some tutors try to prevent this from happening:

We all tend to laugh more heartily when the victim is a person of dignity, that is, a person to whom we normally feel inferior. Maybe we can understand then, why, faced with these concerns, an authoritative tutor may avoid humor or use it as a tool of repression with the unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct students. (50)

Perhaps the only way to use this type of humor is to use gently self-depreciating humor, but without giving up all authority. “If teachers and administrators can laugh at themselves, they’ll be better able to get students to acknowledge their own shortcomings-and open the doors to more creative problem solving,” the “Make Me Laugh” website advises. Gillian Jordan, a tutor at the University of Maine, used self-depreciating humor with one nervous and frustrated student. The student was writing a paper comparing 9mm and 10mm handguns, a subject Jordan knew little about. Jordan made jokes about her “ignorance,” and successfully broke the ice. Jordan’s approach also helped the student realize that one should not take the reader’s knowledge of a subject for granted (8).

Gentle humor can, however, make criticism easier for students to handle. Humor is what D.H. Monro calls “the sugar round the pill” (Sherwood 52). It allows tutors to gently offer suggestions, while leaving the student’s ego intact. Steve Sherwood remembers his own writing tutor reading the worst sections of his first novels aloud in a slow Texas drawl. According to Sherwood, “[My writing coach] made his point in a way that left me bruised but unbroken and without jeopardizing our relationship.” He continues, “Instead of laughing at me, [the tutor] soon had me laughing at myself, giving me the necessary distance from my gaffes to deal with them constructively” (52). Knowing how to gauge the way a student will react to this type of humor can be difficult, especially when a session last only 30 minutes and the tutor does not get to know the students she is working with well. In these cases, perhaps self-depreciating humor is safer.

Unlike the superiority theory, Freud’s theory about humor is that it serves as a sort of release from the daily restrictions in our lives. For example, people make jokes about the government because we are controlled by it and might feel powerless as a result. This type of humor also often focuses on taboo subjects, such as bathroom or sexual humor. One might assume that these types of jokes are always off-limits in the writing center, but perhaps they are not quite as dangerous jokes that make one person feel superior. On page 54, Sherwood describes a student who came to the writing center for help with an assignment about Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing.” The student made an offhand joke about the sexual implications of leaf-sprouting twigs. This lead to a revelation about the sexual imagery within the work and the student left to go rewrite the paper.

However, it is important to keep the audience in mind. Students might sometimes try to push the limits of what type of humor a tutor will find appropriate. Tutors need to establish some type of boundaries with the students, especially to make sure that they actually accomplish something during the tutorial. The website “Make Me Laugh” contains a warning that, “The type of humor seen on television shows like Friends, which many high school students watch regularly, could be considered sexual harassment in the classroom.” The same can be true for college students in the writing center.

Butch Fanale also uses this more direct approach occasionally. He told me that one of his favorite lines to tell students when they begin a session is, “'You can put cake frosting on a piece of dog sh*t and everyone will eat it.' I don’t know if that’s humor, but they seem to get a kick out of it,” he said. Fanale’s line explains the use of correct grammar to make a paper more appealing. His language initially seems to surprise most students, but then they quickly open up and are released from many of their anxieties about writing and the writing center.

Perhaps the reason Fanale’s approach works is that he also uses another type of humor: incongruity. The incongruity theory, credited to German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Schopenhauer is the belief that humor is the result of unexpected connections. It can take the form of irony, when we expect one thing but are presented with another. Fanale said his approach is to let the students think they are being let in on a secret about the writing process, to make them think they have a “backstage pass.” The students come in expecting writing to be a serious yet somewhat mysterious business, and Fanale helps them to turn it into a game.

In the 17th century, Pascal wrote, “Nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which one sees.” (Friend 80) So for example, the joke “I went to my doctor for shingles he sold me aluminum siding,” tricks the mind. I apologize for this lame joke, but it gets the point across: in theory, incongruity emphasizes the mental and intellectual components of humor and can “provide some relief to us from the rigors of logic, reasoning and thinking.” (Shade 21) According to Sherwood, this type of humor can help unleash a student’s creative potential because it can “free up or increase the amount and quality of a person’s creative capacities.” Sherwood describes one session, in which a student could not come up with a synonym for the word “unalterable.” He and the student began thinking aloud, coming up with more and more words that were progressively inappropriate. Afterwards, the student decided that the tone and structure of his paper “were as rigid as his essay.” (53) The student decided to revise the paper and introduce a more flexible tone and more creative ideas.

Humor not only relaxes students and can unleash newfound creativity, but studies show that it also helps students retain information longer. In a 1977 study of humor and retention, Kaplan and Pascoe used humorous cues, such as mnemonic devices to help their subjects remember information. They discovered in their research that students remember more information after watching a lesson employing humorous examples (Shade 20).

A great deal of comedy is graphic, and students will especially remember funny images. Using ridiculous sentences as examples can enliven dry material, such as grammar. Jordan recommends, “When thoroughly stewed, the patients will enjoy the prunes” or, “While we ate the pups romped and played under our feet” (10). Tutors can also bring in cartoons that contain deliberately inflated language or humorous examples from local newspaper columns. Jordan frequently uses a sample sentence written by one serious student to explain why concrete language is important: “Depending on certain circumstances, things should be allowed whereas if other things are evident, some other steps should be taken.” (10) By using silly sample sentences, the tutor can be funny without poking fun at the paper of the student they are tutoring.

However, the amount of humor used should always depend on the student. An ESL student, for example, might not understand word play or examples of silly language. Josh Quinn, an ESL teacher in downtown Pittsburgh, said he only uses situational humor with ESL students because any other type is too confusing. Usually using a great deal of humor with ESL students can make the already stressful situation even worse (however, Quinn added that he had a great deal of fun on April Fool’s Day, taking advantage of the fact that most of his students had never heard of the concept). But Quinn said he tries mainly to use self-depreciating humor to relax his students. Because they are already in a situation where they might feel insecure because of the difficulty in learning a new language, anything else might damage the relationship between tutor and student.

Also, in some cultures, it is not appropriate for students to laugh at a teacher. In Japan, for example, students generally find teacher humor inappropriate and therefore might not connect with it. In one example, a teacher jokingly suggested that the class should have a late Saturday night study session to prepare for an exam, but several Japanese students stayed after class to ask for time and room details (“Make Me Laugh”). In countries like Japan, the education system is structured in a very hierarchal manner, with little room for the type of collaborative learning that many tutors like to use.

But according to The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring, attempts at humor must always be avoided in online tutoring. Because it’s not face-to-face, the tutor has no way to gauge the students’ reactions. The guide advises to establish a friendly tone with email correspondence, but avoid joking around. Even though email has different conventions, and more room for error and slang, lots of joking around, and using smiley faces, humor can easily backfire. For example, some of the students the writers surveyed joked around with tutors but didn’t like it if the tutors joked back (142).

This difference between the rules in tutoring ESL students on tutoring online emphasizes the most important point about using humor in the writing center: whether or not humor is a good strategy depends completely on the student and the attitude the student presents when the tutor meets him or her. The tutor has to develop a sense of how a student will react to humor within in the first few minutes of the tutorial. If the tutor cannot pick up on hints that the student will benefit from or enjoy humor, humor should be avoided. The purpose of the writing center is to teach students how to write well on their own, not to entertain, and there are of course many other techniques for teaching grammar and rhetoric other than humor. On the other hand, there is always the hope and possibility that a simple “Ha ha” will lead to a startling “Ah-ha!” and the student will come to look at writing in a whole new light.

Works Cited

Fanale, Butch. Personal Interview. 1 April 2003.

Friend, Tad. “What’s So Funny?” New Yorker. 11 Nov. 2002: 78-93.

Gillespie, Paula and Lerner, Neal. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. New York: Longman, 2000. 141-147.

Jordan, Gillian. “Humor in Tutorials.” The Writing Lab Newsletter. May 1991: 8-10.

“Make Me Laugh.” Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 30 March 2003.

Quinn, Joshua. Personal Interview. 2 April 2003.

Shade, Richard A. License to Laugh: Humor in the Classroom. Englewood, Colorado: Teacher Ideas Press, 1996.

Sherwood, Steve. “Humor and the Serious Tutor.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 48-54.