“What do you call a factory that makes okay products?”
“A satisfactory.”
I am a real fan of Christmas crackers – but specifically the jokes and that genre of ‘Dad jokes’ that makes us laugh and groan at the same time. This tells you a lot about my sense of humour (a bit lame!) and if you meet me it will remind you to take cover if I’m in a joke telling mood. But aside from avoiding me around yule-tide, jokes can be a really powerful tool for teaching writing skills and how language works.
The Importance of Pleasure in Learning
First off, even if they are corny, telling jokes is a great way to get teen students’ attention – and keep it as they will get a turn writing their own jokes, and, like sneaking extra veg into a tomato spaghetti sauce, the lesson can add some valuable insights into language construct and features. And, just like spaghetti, when students find things enjoyable there will be a little reward for the brain (dopamine) which opens them up to learning, and reinforces as something enjoyable. Like their favourite pasta, they should then want to come back for more!
Writing for the Audience: A Key GCSE Skill
One key skill for GCSE is understanding who your audience is. When I teach creative writing the focus is also on the reader experience, not just on writing it well for yourself. Knowing who your audience will be, and what their expectations are is really key and can take a stretch of the imagination and skill to create the correct ‘voice’: writing a letter to Grandma about a deep sea fishing trip is going to be very different to creating an editorial on the virtues of heat pumps for climate change.
So what makes the joke relevant? Well, we start with a ‘setup’ – understanding how to create expectation is essential to transactional, discursive and descriptive writing tasks. Students start learning to think about the audience and how to ‘prime’ them, which also develops a sense of planning for the task. The punchline has two meanings: literal and figurative. This can be a difficult concept to grasp at higher levels when discussing writer’s effects such as metaphor, and particularly for students who tend to be more literal in their interpretations and who sometimes struggle developing inference skills. But ‘Dad jokes’ make the point really clearly with no subtlety – which is why they are Dad jokes! The listener does quite a few things – they hear the opening line and start creating possibilities with the information they have, they then reinterpret and process when they are given the punchline, and finally they laugh (me), groan (most other people) as the juxtaposition between literal and figurative delivers its comedic effect.
We process this all in a flash. It is familiar, and provides a great way into understanding an audience, language, process and effect, thus enhancing writing skills.
Sophistication in Language Use
Take, for example, Mercutio and Romeo in Romeo and Juliet:
Mercutio: “Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance.”
Romeo:“Not I, believe me. You have dancing shoes with nimble soles; I have a soul of lead so stakes me to the ground I cannot move.”
Romeo and Juliet Act I.iv
Understanding and creating jokes involves sophisticated language skills, including puns, double meaning and timing. Shakespeare loved all three, and often used quite risque humour to keep his diverse audience engaged. This then extends to idioms and colloquial expressions – things to include in the letter to Grandma, but less so in a formal piece like a report. Understanding jokes empowers teens because it demonstrates that they already have these skills and use them daily, thus it is from that concrete base they can build the skills they need in their written work.
Encouraging Parental Support
How can you help? Well, here’s your chance to share jokes and idioms, because while you might be making them moan or writhe with embarrassment, you’ll also be modelling sophisticated language use. Jokes can be a great way to bond and you can compete to create the best-worst jokes on a theme, to suit an occasion, or just to pass time. If you’re stumped, there are a number of websites where you find jokes to tell each other: Country Living magazine has 260 to start you off! And here’s a great explanation of humour by ‘What makes things funny’ given by Peter McGraw at TEDx, a leading researcher at the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado.
Conclusion
Humour is a great way to teach what can be difficult shades of meanings, application and audience. Pleasure in learning is a powerful tool and central to home educating families’ ethos of active and enjoyable learning. It is also a way to get involved with your teen and their language in a way which they are likely to be receptive to – it is a way to engage and not take it too seriously. Jokes are a violation of linguistic norms, but they teach so much without the labour of more pedantry analysis.
And finally, because I can’t resist…
“Why can’t a nose be 12 inches long?”
“Because then it would be a foot.”
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