Next week I’ll begin teaching a course I’m calling Humor in Journalism. (Don’t tell my students that I plan to distribute Groucho glasses on the first day of class to put us in the right mood. I want it to be a surprise.)
Perhaps, with wars raging, Earth burning and the leading presidential candidates ranging from uninspiring to terrifying, a humor class sounds frivolous to you, like the Taylor Swift course they’re offering at Harvard that has drawn so much scorn. Students need Science! Technology! Engineering! Math!
Sez you. I say what they really need is a cream pie right in the kisser.
I’m serious. The purpose of the class is to show that humor is not frivolous. The premise: Life can be grim. Therefore, the news can be grim. Therefore, we need laughter. You know, to keep from crying. Because it’s good medicine.
Humor in journalism can be intentional or inadvertent. Intentional humor is to be found in humor columns (think Dave Barry, the clown prince of humor columnists), editorial cartoons and news stories about ridiculous incidents. Inadvertent humor crops up in “howlers” – glaring errors that slipped past editors – and headlines that can mean something other than what the headline writer intended. Here is an example of each:
- Howler: An elderly woman held off two buglers after they attempted to steal her purse in Skyway Plaza yesterday.
- Headline: Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
My favorite wacky headlines are the ones that deploy a frequently used noun as an infrequently used verb or adjective. Example: Past Dogs Murder Suspect. One’s first thought is that we’re looking at adjective-noun-verb-noun: Dogs have murdered the suspect – and not just any dogs, but dogs that were perhaps avenging their abandonment by the suspect.
Then the lightbulb goes on. It’s noun-verb-adjective-noun: The murder suspect can’t escape (is dogged by) his past.
The takeaway from the above exegesis should be that the real danger of a class on humor is not that it fails to impart the practical knowledge students will need to succeed in a competitive job market, but that academic study tends to drain humor of its humorousness. Or as E.B. White put it, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
Analysts gotta analyze, however. Consider this partial list of rip-roaring titles of academic journal articles about the impact of Jon Stewart:
- “Hearing it From Jon Stewart: The Impact of the Daily Show on Public Attentiveness to Politics” (International Journal of Public Opinion Research)
- “News You Can’t Use: Jon Stewart’s Daily Show Media Critiques” (Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly)
- “Mocking the News: How The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Holds Traditional Broadcast News Accountable” (Journal of Mass Media Ethics)
Like my esteemed peers, my humor-scholars-in-training will look at the ways in which comedians like Stewart, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Bill Maher riff on the news. And we’ll look at spoofs of journalism, from The Onion to “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live” – “twofers” that mock both the news and the stylized ways in which the news is delivered.
What a hoot this class is going to be, I thought when I came up with the idea.
Then I got worried. Humor tends to be culture-specific (though the Mars Explorer has found that Martians laugh when they see another Martian get a cream pie in the kisser). What’s funny in the U.S. might not be funny in Japan. What’s funny in 2024 might not have been funny in 1924. What’s funny to college professors might not be funny to college students.
I don’t regard past classes’ stone-faced responses to my quips as dispositive: I may not be nearly as witty as I think I am. It’s their nonreactions when I show them a funny clip or read them a funny passage that have me thinking I made a terrible mistake when I proposed this class.
Case in point: I once showed a scene from a Marx Brothers movie to a class. “The Stateroom Scene” from “A Night at the Opera” stuffs a ridiculous number of people into a tiny cabin on an ocean liner. My favorite line: A manicurist asks Groucho if he wants his fingernails cut long or short. “You better make them short,” Groucho says. “It’s getting kind of crowded in here.” No one even smiled.
OK, Harpo, Chico and Groucho might not be to everyone’s taste. But I’ve sometimes wondered if anything is funny to college students.
Could be there’s a fear factor here: In late adolescence you don’t want to look around the room and realize you’re the only one laughing, thereby exposing yourself as the odd duck.
Why a duck? Never mind. It’s an old Marx Brothers joke.
Judging by the way 2023 ended, 2024 has the makings of a most unfunny year. Which is why you have to find things to laugh about. It’ll keep you sane. Look at me.
OK, bad example.
