Blog by JZ Garrod
I’d like to start by thanking everyone who came out to the Brown Bag Teaching Talk on March 3rd. The talk was based around a course I taught in the Winter of 2016 called “Sociology Through Stand-up.” Below are some added words that cover the gist of the talk. I hope you find it useful.
To put it simply, I love comedy. There is nothing in my life that makes me feel better than making other people laugh. If I can somehow elicit a good, hearty, belly-laugh from someone, I consider my day’s work to be done; for that one day, I feel as if I contributed something good and noble to the world.
This love of comedy has often come at the expense of others, however. One’s jokes are usually pointed in a particular direction. For me, it was often authority figures: parents, teachers, or anyone else that had the unfortunate task of convincing me to do something that I didn’t want to do. I imagine that my early distaste for such figures was their inability to provide me with a logical basis for their authority. It didn’t make sense to me why one relatively unconcerned adult held all the power in a classroom of 30-odd kids (or 30 odd kids, depending on your perspective or understanding of grammar). “Because I said so!” doesn’t hold a lot of weight when you really think about it. It wasn’t until many years (and detentions) later that I discovered sociology. Finally there was a way to interrogate power relations without getting in trouble! (well, sort of.)
Although my interests in power today tend to be more academic in nature than they were when I was growing up, I can’t help but appreciate the way in which comedy continues to speak truth to power. Not necessarily the truth, but a truth. Since ‘truth’ is why we often find jokes funny (“It’s funny because it’s true!”) it opens up an entire realm of investigation into why we find certain jokes funny and what that says about the type of society we live in. Furthermore, comedians are often able to tell us things that we wouldn’t believe in any other context; and they do so while making us laugh. This, I argue, is very significant, and something that we should use to our advantage as mediators of (usually depressing) knowledge.
With that in mind, here are two reasons why I think comedy should play a central role in any introductory sociology class. The first is that comedy involves a deep level of observation and understanding of society. To be funny is to peel back a layer of reality in order to point out how strange something ‘normal’ is. A good example of this is the classic Seinfeld opener, “Have you ever noticed…?” (e.g., “Have you ever noticed there are a lot of butlers named Jeeves?”) The purpose of the opener is to get the audience to go, “I have noticed that, and that is weird!” We can use comedy for the same purpose in sociology by allowing it to begin the process of critical thinking. As such, I like to start my classes off with a comedy clip that is relevant to the days lecture. By the time we’re ready to get going, they’re ready to learn.
The second reason—which very much follows from the first—is that comedy is an extremely effective means of softening the blow of critical thinking, especially in respect to the various touchy subjects that are the bread and butter of sociological analysis. One of the most difficult things any sociology instructor has to deal with are all the preconceived notions (the ‘ruling ideas,’ so to speak) that students bring into the classroom. Comedy is a great way of sidestepping their automatic defence mechanisms. It allows the students to relax a bit, to laugh, and ultimately, to let their guard down. This not only gets them to start immediately questioning some of their own assumptions (“Hmmm, that is weird when you think about it…”) but allows you, the professor, to begin a line of questioning that can eventually lead you to the heart of the topic that you want them to investigate. In my limited experience, I have found that this tactic does a good job of helping to reduce the idea that I am somehow telling them what to think. I mean, it’s hard for a student to take that position after they’ve just spent the last three minutes attempting to explain to me why fart jokes are timeless.
As a final note, I’d also like to add that many of the sociologists I know are extremely funny people; understanding the nuances of society will do that to a person, I suppose. And while we might not have the opportunity to be funny in our writing, we certainly do in the classroom—so take it.