Max. Classroom Capacity: The Serious Business of Humor in the Classroom

Dear readers,

When I was a high school student, I remember experiencing the most unusual exam of my life. This was a final exam in English, and I think it was a provincial standard administered to every grade 11 English student in Quebec. The exam consisted of a set of brief readings that students had to write an essay about, identifying common themes that occurred across the readings. My classmates and I were uniformly perplexed by the exam, and as it turned out, not a single student in my class (and perhaps in the entire province) successfully identified the theme.

I remember that one of the readings was the Mark Twain short story “The Recent Great French Duel.” I don’t remember the titles of the other readings now, but some had elements of racial stereotyping, some seemed to critique social mores and classism, others presented seemingly important figures as absurd caricatures, and so on. If you are familiar with Twain’s “Duel,” you know that it is difficult to read without laughing out loud. Many of the other readings were of this variety as well. During the exam, my classmates and I all struggled to identify a coherent theme in the readings, a task made harder by the frequent snatches of involuntary giggles from students that would echo across the otherwise silent and solemn exam room. All I could come up with for a theme was “stereotyping,” and I dutifully spent my remaining time writing about how each reading addressed this very important and serious theme. As we all found out later, the intended theme of the exam was humor. I’m not sure what it says about high school education in Canada that it occurred to not a single student in my class that humor could be a legitimate topic for academic scrutiny.¹ However, I certainly remember that exam—and not many others!

This begs the question, can using humor help you reach your Max. Classroom Capacity as an instructor? I can immediately think of several reasons why humor might benefit student learning: Humor can build rapport between students and the teacher, increasing student engagement; humor can provide variety to a class meeting; it can stimulate the brain, surprising students or making them think about certain issues in a novel way; and humor can demonstrate that the instructor cares enough about students to try to make their classroom experience more enjoyable.

On the other hand, perhaps instructor humor diverts students’ attention from course content, makes students roll their eyes at the lame professor desperately trying to be funny to distract from their inability to teach, feeds the instructor’s ego at the expense of students’ education, or just wastes precious class time?

What is the answer? Six seven! Just kidding.² Let’s look at the research literature for answers. The role of humor in teaching and learning is a topic that has been the subject of empirical research for several decades now. But before we get into the findings, you will be shocked to learn that most of these articles aren’t the least bit funny to read!³

.Perhaps there is nothing funny about analyzing humor? We shall see. Nevertheless, there is much to learn here. For example, humor is generally defined as anything that people find humorous (Romero & Cruthirds, 2006). The following is an incomplete and unrepresentative review of this literature.

Ziv (1988) is one of the earlier empirical studies of humor in the classroom. If you are looking for a paper that discusses the appropriate dosage of humor for a statistics class, this is it! Ziv provides several sample jokes that were used to train teachers in their treatment condition to be funnier. Here’s one example:

an explorer in Africa, talking to a few native children who watch him somewhat surprised. Behind the explorer, and without his being aware of it, is a huge crocodile with a wide open mouth, ready to swallow him. He, addressing the kids, says, “There is no need to be afraid of crocodiles; around here their average length is only about 50 centimeters.” One of the children says to another, “This guy had better think about the standard deviation, too.” (p. 9)

Across two experiments, students who were randomly assigned to the humor condition received an “optimal” dosage of about 3–4 jokes per lesson, with each joke illustrating a statistical concept that was just taught. Ziv found that students in the “humor” condition had significantly higher exam scores than the control.

Berk and Nanda (1998) also considered humor in statistics classes. They hypothesized that humor improves student achievement and attitudes and reduces anxiety. They found that humor positively influenced student attitudes and reduced anxiety but did not improve achievement. They also provide several examples of humor appropriate for the classroom—here’s one in the form of a multiple-choice question:

“What is the level of measurement of the following variable?

Wait time to see your doctor:

__10 minutes or less

__More than 10 but less than 30 minutes

__Between 30 minutes and one hour

__I’m still waiting” (p. 392)

The answer: hilarious!⁴

Gorham and Christophel (1990) hypothesized and found evidence that instructor humor is a kind of immediacy behavior that improves students’ motivation, enjoyment, knowledge retention, and understanding of the course material by making students feel closer to the instructor and the course. However, they argue that the type of humor matters. Positive effects were found for humor that was positive, inclusive, and course related, but not for humor that was perceived as tendentious or self-deprecating. Notably, in one of the few examples of author humor, in explaining the null relationship between negative instructor humor and students’ attitudes toward the instructor, the authors joked that “students might enjoy Joan Rivers as a teacher but put little stock in what she teaches them” (p. 59). Wait, was that a joke?

Cooper et al. (2018) examined gender differences in students’ perceptions of instructor humor in STEM classes. They tested three types of instructor humor: that which was positively received (“funny”), ineffective (“unfunny”), and negatively received (“offensive”). They found that funny humor increased student engagement and attention to course material, as well as their perceptions of instructor relatability and sense of belonging. In contrast, offensive humor (e.g., jokes about gender, race, or stereotypes) decreased students’ perceptions of instructor relatability and belonging, particularly for female students.

By far the funniest read was Romal (2008), who, to her credit, attempted to provide hands-on humor training by including multiple jokes (or facsimiles thereof) in her paper. She meta-analyzed eight studies of the effectiveness of humor to understand the potential merits of instructors using humor in accounting classes. She found a meta-analytic coefficient of 0.46 and recommended that accounting instructors purchase, of many available options, the book on using humor in public speaking that best fits their personal style and their students’ needs. Romal also helpfully suggested googling “jokes accounting” to find more than 150 thousand sources (p. 93). Beyond the unintended humor produced by imagining accounting professors diligently studying books on humor and infinity scrolling through Google hits of accounting jokes, Romal provided a table of strategies for the effective use of humor. This table included such gems as recommending wearing items of clothing related to the “financial statements de jour,”⁵ the joke “what industry has many material errors? The garment industry!” and the “humorous” anecdote of an accountant who recommended using a helicopter to count the inventory of chickens on a free-range chicken ranch that ended in chickens being sucked into the rotors, spewing blood and chicken parts everywhere⁶ (pp. 94–95). I don’t want to be mean to accountants or propagate unfair accountant stereotypes, but I found the antihumor of this article to be incredibly funny.

We know from basic research that humor and laughter can have many positive effects, including decreasing anxiety and stress (e.g., Berk et al., 1989; Fry, 1992; Martin & Dobbin, 1988) and improving quality of life (Kuiper et al., 1992), but how can it benefit student learning? Instructional Humor Processing Theory⁷ (Wanzer et al., 2010) provides the following account. An instructor makes a joke. When students do not perceive that joke as incongruous with their expectations for the situation, they don’t notice the joke—the humor went over their heads. When the joke is perceived as incongruous with students’ expectations of the situation, but they cannot make sense of the incongruity, they know that the instructor tried to make a joke, but they didn’t understand it; therefore, it is not perceived as humor—they didn’t get the joke. When students can make sense of the incongruity, then it’s perceived as humor. However, the type of humor matters. When the humor is “inappropriate” (e.g., it is offensive, disparages others, etc.), then it generates a negative affective reaction that either undermines or has no effect on learning. In contrast, when the humor is “appropriate,” it generates a positive affective reaction. In this last circumstance, the positive affect experienced will aid learning and retention of course material only when the humor is related to the course content. Said differently, an instructor’s funny behavior will benefit learning only when it is perceived by students as humorous, students understand the humor, the humor is appropriate, and the humor is related to course content.

In summary, the evidence shows that humor is beneficial to students’ well-being, their attitudes and motivation in class, and their learning when it is relevant to the course material and appropriate.⁸ So, knowing this, how do we leverage humor in the classroom to become more effective instructors?

To me, this is a difficult question. It is dangerous business trying to be funny. Here’s what I think.

1. Don’t be afraid to use humor in ways that come naturally to you. Humor is not inherently unprofessional, and it can benefit your students. However, make sure it’s not offensive or mean humor. And if you want to use humor as a tool to improve learning specifically, then it should be relevant to what you are trying to teach.
2. You can probably learn or be trained to improve your sense of humor or tell more jokes, but whether you can improve how funny you actually are is less clear. Still, some of the research involved manipulations of humor, including the use of specific jokes (which generally didn’t seem all that funny), and this research generally found positive effects. Frankly, the bar for students’ expectations of humor in the classroom is probably very low. So, take a few minutes to write a joke about face validity, even if the joke isn’t that funny—as long as you don’t offend anyone, you probably won’t do any harm, and it might help students learn and recall that concept!

In that spirit, and to open myself to the same ridicule as these and other brave humor researchers (who I feel bad for making fun of), I end with eight terrible jokes about I-O psychology, written with some help from ChatGPT.

As always, please email me with your thoughts, critiques, ideas, knock-knock jokes, or to just say hi: Loren.Naidoo@csun.edu

1. I tried to write a complicated joke about Cronbach’s alpha. But it just didn’t hold together.
2. How many I-O psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but he needed to validate the new bulb’s performance first.
3. You know you’re an I-O psychologist when your dream date involves face validation.
4. I asked my boss for autonomy. She said, “I’ll allow it—under close supervision.”
5. What’s an I-O psychologist’s favorite pickup line? “I’m not saying you’re a control variable, but you’re definitely influencing my dependent variable.”
6. Structural equation modeling: because multiple regression just wasn’t complicated
7. I tried applying Herzberg’s two-factor theory at home. My wife said that compliments are motivators, but scrubbing the toilets is hygiene.
8. I ran a goal-setting workshop. Step 1: Get everyone to show up on time. Step 2: Redefine “time.”

Notes

1 On the other hand, Canadians do punch above their weight when it comes to our many famous comics, and we deserve some credit for writing an English exam on humor in the first place.

2 If you understand this “joke,” you either have a school-aged kid or you spend too much time online. BTW, the 6–7 meme is also a great illustration of humor being whatever people find humorous.

3 In case it’s not clear, this is me attempting a joke about the lack of humor in the literature on humor, a situation that I found to be funny. But if I found it funny, it must be considered humor according to the common definition of the term. By extension that would mean that the article WAS funny (at least to me), therefore it DID contain humor, which then paradoxically contradicts the very thing that I found funny about it. To further complicate things, this pseudo paradox itself is funny to me. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if none of this is funny to you. My point: Trying to be funny is hard.

4 The real answer is, arguably, nominal (e.g., if you are answering the question while waiting for your doctor), or, barring that scenario, ordinal, or, if you are a practicing I-O psychologist, it’s interval because the stats for that are a lot easier.

5 If any readers have training in accounting, please, PLEASE send me pictures of clothing that looks like the financial statements de jour!

6 For the record, this is one of the few jokes that I didn’t find funny at all… just seems cruel and gross. However, the idea that this joke is recommended to accounting professors so that they can be funny, that’s funny!

7 Yes, this is a real theory!

8 Of course, this is not the whole story. I’m not a humor researcher, and a more in-depth recounting of other outcomes and mediating processes is beyond the scope of this column.

References

Berk, R. A., & Nanda, J. P. (1998). Effects of jocular instructional methods on attitudes, anxiety, and achievement in statistics courses. Humor, 11(4), 383–410. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.1998.11.4.383

Berk, R. A., Tan, S. A., & Fry, W. F. (1989). Neuroendocrine and stress hormone changes during mirthful laughter. American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 298(6), 390–396. https://doi.org/10.1097/00000441-198912000-00006

Cooper, K. M., Hendrix, T., Stephens, M. D., Cala, J. M., Mahrer, K., Krieg, A., Agloro, A. C. M., Badini, G. V., Barnes, M. E., Eledge, B., Jones, R., Lemon, E. C., Massimo, N. C., Martin, A., Ruberto, T., Simonson, K., Webb, E. A., Weaver, J., Zheng, Y., & Brownell, S. E. (2018). To be funny or not to be funny: Gender differences in student perceptions of instructor humor in college science courses. PLoS ONE, 13(8), e0201258. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201258

Fry, W. F., Jr. (1992). The physiologic effects of humor, mirth, and laughter. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267(13), 1857–1858. https://doi.org/10.1001/JAMA.267.13.1857

Gorham, J., & Christophel, D. M. (1990). The relationship of teachers’ use of humor in the classroom to immediacy and student learning. Communication Education, 39(1), 46–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529009378786

Kuiper, N. A., Martin, R. A., & Dance, K. A. (1992). Sense of humour and enhanced quality of life. Personality and Individual Differences, 13(12), 1273–1283. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(92)90169-P

Martin, R.A., & Dobbin, J.P. (1989). Sense of humor, hassles, and immunoglobulin A: Evidence for a stress-moderating effect of humor. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 18, 93–105. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.2190/724B-3V06-QC5N-6587

Romal, J. B. (2008). Use of humor as a pedagogical tool for accounting education. Academy of Educational Leadership Journal, 12(1), 83–96. https://soar.suny.edu/entities/publication/f05b5386-8f73-4c0e-b6d9-db17ee0bec71

Romero, E. J., & Cruthirds, K. W. (2006). The use of humor in the workplace. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(2), 58–69. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2006.20591005

Wanzer, M. B., Frymier, A. B., & Irwin, J. (2010). An explanation of the relationship between instructor humor and student learning: Instructional humor processing theory. Communication Education, 59(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520903367238

Ziv, A. (1988). Teaching and learning with humor: Experiment and replication. Journal of Experimental Education, 57(1), 4–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.1988.10806492