{"id":8305,"date":"2018-03-10T11:01:21","date_gmt":"2018-03-10T16:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/?p=7102"},"modified":"2025-06-10T09:14:31","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T13:14:31","slug":"teaching-sociology-through-stand-up-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/2018\/teaching-sociology-through-stand-up-comedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Sociology Through Stand-up Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Teaching Sociology Through Stand-up Comedy\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Blog by JZ Garrod<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d 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 \u201cSociology Through Stand-up.\u201d Below are some added words that cover the gist of the talk. I hope you find it useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s work to be done; for that one day, I feel as if I contributed something good and noble to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This love of comedy has often come at the expense of others, however. One\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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). \u201cBecause I said so!\u201d doesn\u2019t hold a lot of weight when you really think about it. It wasn\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although my interests in power today tend to be more academic in nature than they were when I was growing up, I can\u2019t help but appreciate the way in which comedy continues to speak truth to power. Not necessarily the <\/em>truth, but a<\/em> truth. Since \u2018truth\u2019 is why we often find jokes funny (\u201cIt\u2019s funny because it\u2019s true!\u201d) it opens up an entire realm of investigation into why<\/em> 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\u2019t believe in any other context; and they do so while making us laugh<\/em>. This, I argue, is very significant, and something that we should use to our advantage as mediators of (usually depressing) knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018normal\u2019 is. A good example of this is the classic Seinfeld opener, \u201cHave you ever noticed\u2026?\u201d (e.g., \u201cHave you ever noticed there are a lot of butlers named Jeeves?\u201d) The purpose of the opener is to get the audience to go, \u201cI have noticed that, and that is <\/em>weird!\u201d 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\u2019re ready to get going, they\u2019re ready to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second reason\u2014which very much follows from the first\u2014is 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 \u2018ruling ideas,\u2019 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 (\u201cHmmm, that is <\/em>weird when you think about it\u2026\u201d) 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\u2019s hard for a student to take that position after they\u2019ve just spent the last three minutes attempting to explain to me why fart jokes are timeless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a final note, I\u2019d 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\u2014so take it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Blog by JZ Garrod I\u2019d 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 \u201cSociology Through Stand-up.\u201d Below are some added words that cover the gist of the talk. I hope […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-departmental-blog"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8305"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20792,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8305\/revisions\/20792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}