An earnest approach to assigning blame

Earlier this week I enjoyed a chat with Lady Bracknell--or with the colleague who will be playing the role of Lady Bracknell next week in a community production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The usual administrative claptrap is so much easier to stomach when I imagine the words spoken in the distinctive cadence of Lady Bracknell, who is remembered for lines like these:

Thirty-five is an attractive age. London is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. 

[After asking Jack Worthing whether he smokes and receiving an affirmative reply]: I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.  

My favorite line occurs as Lady Bracknell questions Jack Worthing about his suitability as a match for her daughter:

Lady Bracknell: Are your parents living?

Jack Worthing: I have lost both my parents.

Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

Cracks me up every time. Blaming an orphan for the loss of parents is ridiculous, of course, but it becomes more ludicrous when it comes to light that, in this situation, the child was not the careless one. 

We're not comfortable blaming Jack for being left behind with the baggage, but Odysseus is certainly comfortable blaming Poseidon for raining disasters down on his head--even though Odysseus himself bears a big chunk of the blame. A hero enmeshed in horrors may need to assign blame outside himself, but pointing the finger doesn't do much to get him out of trouble.

Yesterday someone tried to assign blame for the recent string of disasters besetting my household: "We all know who did this to you--the Man Upstairs." As if some all-powerful being gets his jollies by targeting my office with mold, my house with floods and windstorms, and my son with lymphoma. I don't intend to engage in theological debate regarding the origin of pain and suffering, but I have always felt that there's so much awfulness oozing around loose in the world that I shouldn't be surprised when some of it sticks to me. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, etc. It just seems like we've met our quota of rain for a while so we ought to be due for a long dry spell.

Silly me! 

The good news is that my son and I both have appointments at The James next Thursday, so we can share the ride.

The bad news is that his appointments deal with the extremely scary prospect of getting a bone marrow transplant while my appointment is a consultation with a surgical oncologist who would like to remove the cancerous lump from my breast. 

Lady Bracknell might say that having two members of the same household undergoing cancer treatment at the same time looks like carelessness, but whose carelessness? Finding someone to blame won't help any of us cope, but what will? 

I won't have a treatment plan until I get more imaging, so I have no idea how this new diagnosis will affect my ability to teach and perform my administrative tasks. Plenty of people have offered to help and I will take them up on those offers as soon as I have more information. Meanwhile, I teach my classes and perform my administrative tasks and take care of my household and try very hard not to think too much about what lies ahead. 

But if a little comedy from Lady Bracknell can lighten the load, I'll grab hold of it in earnest.   

Mitty and me

With my hands buried deep in the bowels of the printer, scrabbling desperately after the wrinkled scrap of paper jamming up the works, I glance at the clock and see that I need to dash upstairs to teach a class in 30 seconds, which doesn't leave any time to wash my ink-stained fingers.

Today I've been struggling to make things work--clearing a stubborn paper jam from the printer, fumbling with a so-called fillable form that resisted my efforts to fill in the blanks, transcribing a url incorrectly and leading students to the dreaded "404 Error." Somehow, though, all this mechanical incompetence seems appropriate on a day when I'm teaching James Thurber's story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

For Mitty, too, is bedeviled by machinery, so incapable of putting chains on his tires in the winter that he resolves to put his arm in a sling so the garage mechanic won't view him with contempt when he asks for help. The milquetoast Mitty bows to his wife's warnings--he's driving too fast, he ought to be wearing galoshes, he can't be trusted to buy the right brand of puppy biscuit. Even a revolving door whistles at him derisively.

Which is why Mitty takes refuge in a fantasy world in which he exudes authority, knowledge, and competence. The real Mitty can't park his car without assistance, but in his fantasies, he can pilot a "hurtling eight-engine Navy hydroplane" or use a fountain pen to replace a faulty piston in a complicated medical machine, and if the fantasy Mitty, accused of murder, had his right arm in a sling--well, he testifies, "I could killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand."

What would Walter Mitty do with a paper jam or a faulty url? If he struggled to remember to buy overshoes or the right brand of puppy biscuit, how would he handle the many passwords needed to survive modern life? Today as the printer tried to consume my whole hand, I kept waiting for it to say "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" and I wondered what kind of fantasy scenario could make my technological struggles appear heroic. 

In the end I determined to face my students with the kind of stoic nonchalance Mitty displays at the end of the story, "Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last," tearing off the blindfold to look squarely at the firing squad.

Oh, shoot--there's still ink on my hands. 

Mount Chicago: comedy, memory, anomaly

When people ask me what Adam Levin's new novel, Mount Chicago, is about, I'm tempted to respond, "It's about 600 pages long."

The length is an important detail I neglected to notice when I ordered the book. I'd read a review that made me think this novel could be a good reading assignment for my Concepts of Comedy class, but a 600-page novel in that class would wipe out half of the syllabus. I might assign a 600-page novel in an upper-level class full of English majors, but certainly not in a lower-level class full of General Education students. Unless I want to spend a month talking to myself about a novel no one else in the room has read, I'm not going to assign Mount Chicago in my Comedy class.

Which is not to say that it has nothing to say about comedy. In fact, the novel tackles a couple of my favorite questions: How do cultures memorialize tragic events, and what role can comedy play? The sections that deal with these topics are insightful and often quite funny, but they're funny in a way unlikely to resonate with my students. I mean, when the malaprop-prone Mayor says he wants a memorial more popular than Auschwitz but "less depressing," the laughter is not unmixed with pain.

But, on the other hand, there are plenty of poop jokes, plus a personable parrot named Gogol, a duck named Momo whose attempt to free his people--er, ducks--from their oppressors is thwarted by an untimely erection and who therefore becomes a comedian, and a comedian named Shlomo--er, Solomon Gladman--doomed by hemorrhoids to a miserable life that may or may not be redeemed by comedy.

It's complicated, in other words. The style evokes Vonnegut, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, with massive digressions that tumble forward and backward and circle in upon themselves before reaching punchlines that are frequently worth the effort.

The longest digressions concern Apter Schutz, who seems at first like a minor character but, like the parrot named Gogol, steps up, demonstrating a powerful ability to make money through honest but not always honorable means and eventually becoming advisor to the malaprop-spouting Mayor of Chicago, who struggles to create the appropriate response to a disaster that swallows up a huge chunk of the city. 

 

This disaster is, more or less, the driver of the plot, such as it is. First, what to call the disaster? "Sinkhole" is accurate, but "Sinkholes were for Florida. They made you think of swamps and they made you think of armpits. Swampy armpits." The Mayor similarly dismisses "the seismic event" (too earthquaky), but finally Apter offers "the anomaly," which earns him a job as the Mayor's chief advisor, in which position he is placed in charge of developing the park that will serve as a memorial to the anomaly and become a more popular but less depressing Auschwitz, and off we go on a million digressions, some of which are rewarding and others not so much.

 

But I kept reading through almost 600 pages because that's what I do, and in that I resemble no one so much as the hardy Chicagoans described by their Mayor in response to the aforementioned anomaly:

We are, every one of us, all-star NFL linemen in our souls, and yes it is true that I wish, like I'm sure all of you wish, that there had never been any chapter that required our talent for this overcoming of it to be demonstrated, but we have demonstrated that talent, in spades, we have put our big shoulders to the task of tackling this chapter that needs to be tackled, we have tackled it in fact, and we will keep on demonstrating even more of our talent in even further spades, we will keep on tackling it till the game is over or it can't get up, whichever comes first, and if you want to know why, I will tell you why, even though I think you already know why: because this is Chicago and we are Chicagoans, and that's what we do.

So yes: I have tackled all the chapters, and I found something funny in all of them and sometimes something admirable and often something surreal or bizarre, but now I am done tackling chapters and I am closing the book.

Fueling final exams

My American Lit classroom was bubbling with energy at noon when students gathered to take their final exam. Where was all that energy last week when we were discussing poetry? No matter: a few of these students are graduating on Saturday and they're delighted to finally be done; the rest are just full of beans. Cocoa beans, to be exact. Yes, I brought chocolate to the final exam. Final exams are long and grueling--I don't want anyone to faint dead away. I want their brain cells to be alert and well lubricated, and chocolate can help. I suspect that some of these students will find other ways to lubricate their brains later on.

My Learning in Retirement class was also bubbling yesterday but for different reasons. No final exams in the Comedy in Theory and Practice class; just a final wrap-up of concepts and an opportunity for my retirees to put what they've learned into practice: each class member could take the microphone for up to five minutes to share a joke or funny story or whatever. If someone could find a way to transform Dad Jokes into fuel, that class could keep the world turning on its axis for a few millennia. 

I was strong-armed into teaching that class but I came to look forward to it every Tuesday afternoon. I mean, who doesn't appreciate a weekly excuse to laugh with a bunch of interesting people? We read some great stuff and watched some silly videos but mostly it was all about the laughter. Now I'm looking at the vast expanse of summer break stretching before me and wondering where I'll find my Tuesday afternoon laughs. Shall I go out back and tell jokes to the birds?

That's the drawback of summer break: no good reason to spend time regularly yammering with a room full of people. Of course I'll have Writing Wednesdays, and Faculty Council will continue to meet occasionally over the summer to hash out details of the College's survival plan--oops, Strategic Plan, sorry!--but laughter is rarely at the top of the agenda for those meetings. Still, it's better than spending the entire summer talking to the birds.

They've been pretty bubbly lately, the birds. For a week I've been hearing wood thrushes in the woods below the woodpile, and this morning there were orioles at the end of my road. Mornings are raucous with birdsong, suggesting that the local avian population is getting plenty of the bird equivalent of chocolates. 

Have my students had enough? I've run out of things to teach them this semester so it's time for them to show me what they've learned, and then it's time for me to read it all and assign a grade. So many things to grade! I need some fuel. Good thing they didn't eat up all the chocolates.

 

Some funny business

Some requests are easy to resist. A student wants to meet with me via Zoom at 10 p.m. on a weeknight during Spring Break? Um, no, and I'm not even going to offer an excuse.

But I did feel the need to offer excuses the past ten times I refused the annual request to teach a course in our local Learning in Retirement program. I taught for the program once before and found it rewarding, exhausting, and exhilarating, but I've resisted their requests ever since for various good reasons: Too busy or tired to teach a two-hour class once a week for eight weeks; too distracted by other projects (writing and editing essays on teaching comedy); unwilling to put in that much work for a stipend that's significant but not life-changing. 

But the leaders of the program persisted and finally I agreed to teach a course on comedy in spring of 2020. Then came Covid. Then the whole program moved online and they asked me to teach the class via Zoom, and I said that I couldn't spend one additional millisecond on Zoom than was absolutely necessary or my head would explode. 

Then this spring they went back to in-person classes and I ran out of excuses, so here I am getting ready to lead a weekly discussion of comedy with a bunch of retired people, and I couldn't be more pleased. For one thing, I need that stipend to pay for my new cell phone so I can continue to enjoy funny pictures of my grandkids, and for another, I need to immerse myself in comic material to distract myself from the current misery on campus, including the fear that I'll never get another raise. 

So today's the big day: an introduction to the history of comedy, illustrated with film clips and some short readings. I can count on these students to read the homework assignments, so I know they'll be prepared to discuss theories of comedy next week. Among other topics, we'll have sessions about comedy and the human condition, comedy as uniter or divider, and what makes British comedy so very British (with an expert guest speaker). I have one class session set aside to view a film, but I'm going to ask them for suggestions before deciding which one. And during the final class session, I've set aside time for anyone who wants to perform up to five minutes of comedy in front of the group. I hope some of them will want to put comedy theories into practice, and by that time we'll be so comfortable with each other that we'll laugh even if it isn't funny.

So I guess it's a good thing that I finally ran out of excuses. Eight weeks from now I may be exhausted from the extra work, but at least I will have had a few laughs along the way.

 

A CFP for people who care about comedy

I know a lot of funny teachers, and I know teachers who don't consider themselves funny but know how to use funny texts to help students understand important concepts, and I'm sure there are many more out there whom I haven't met yet. But I want to hear from all of them--or a good number, at least, because it's going to take a bunch of people who care about comedy to make this project happen.

Yes: I'm excited to announce that I'm seeking essay submissions for a new volume on Teaching Comic Texts, part of MLA's Options for Teaching Series. Click here to read the full Call for Proposals and see how to submit, but meanwhile, here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

When comedy dominates popular culture so thoroughly that it’s difficult to distinguish spoofs from truths, when identities and relationships form and fumble on a foundation of comic memes, and when the powerful and the powerless wield comedy alternately as weapon or shield, it’s time for the academy to take comedy seriously. Teaching Comic Texts, edited by Bev Hogue, will examine how comic texts of many types can be deployed in classrooms, either as a topic of literary or cultural study or as a window into understanding other fields. In addition to exploring historical and theoretical contexts, essays in the volume will provide practical insights for teaching comic texts in a variety of disciplines. As part of the MLA’s Options for Teaching series, the volume will appeal to beginning or experienced teachers in undergraduate and graduate programs in literature and language, rhetoric and composition, culture studies, media studies, communication, philosophy, creative writing, and other disciplines where comic texts might prove useful. 

A field that ranges from Aristophanes to The Onion by way of Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, and The Simpsons offers a wide range of areas for inquiry open to a variety of methodologies. Comic texts may illuminate moments in history or the lives of others, offer models for rhetorical methods, challenge students to practice critical thinking skills, examine aspects of the human condition, and more. Students studying comedy might engage with plays, novels, and poetry alongside films, memes, and live stand-up performances, and they need a wide range of tools and activities to equip them to exist in a comedy-heavy media environment. Essays describing specific methods that can be adapted across disciplines are especially welcome, and the volume will conclude with a collection of lesson plans, assignments, and other practical resources.

Now don't you want to be a part of this project? Or maybe you know someone who needs to know about this--please share! I'm eager to see the proposals come pouring in from funny (or  unfunny) people who want to take comedy pedagogy seriously. Just click here to get started. Can't wait to hear from you!

Smiles by the miles

My daughter and I are sitting on the floor playing keep-away with the imps--rolling a ball past my grandson, who runs around shrieking "Bat-ball! Bat-ball!", and tossing another ball over the head of my granddaughter, who screams with joy when she catches it--and all that laughter hits me like a stimulant. I can feel brain cells waking up, no longer sleepy from the two-hour drive, and the big rolling belly laughs feel like a whole-body workout. 

There's nothing like a visit with the grandkids to remind me that I don't get enough laughter in my daily life. I feed on the kids' silliness, knowing that I'll soon have to go home and deal with serious issues, like course preps and grocery shopping and doing our taxes, which is more likely to make me laugh than cry.

I need a laugh--a big, helpless, all-consuming belly laugh--and I'm not getting it from the pile of reading quizzes on my desk. What my office really needs right now, then, is a mess of little imps running around and being silly--but I don't believe I can get them from the office supply store, and if I could, the College would never approve the purchase order. 

Think he's enjoying his swimming lesson?

Instant snowman kit. Some assembly required.

 

A hands-off exercise

Today I encouraged my comedy students not to destroy the world. 

"This is a thought experiment," I reminded them. "You're just supposed to argue that humanity should or should not be destroyed on the basis of evidence from three comic texts."

Silence. Puzzled looks. More silence.

"There is no hands-on lab component to this exercise," I added, "so if any of you go out of this room and actually destroy the world, you'll get an F on the assignment."

One guy grins: "We'll all get the big F." A little laughter. Very little.

And so I drop the philosophical speculation for a moment and show clip from Catch-22, when Yossarian gets a medal while naked. We talk about meaning and values and meaninglessness and despair, and then I pop the big question: "If life is meaningless and the only response is despair, why make a movie?"

Lightbulbs begin to glimmer dimly over a few heads. Very dim. Very few. Doing philosophy in a comedy class is a tough sell on a bleak Monday afternoon, but if nothing else, I may have left them too stunned to even think about going out and destroying the world.

Ixnay on the athwray

Note to self: Who made you the Parking Police? Starting the day with a heated altercation over traffic laws is not a brilliant idea, even if the anger grows every time you see that particular colleague violate the one-way street sign until you feel as if you're going to explode. Releasing the pressure with a face-to-face encounter first thing in the morning is only going to sour the rest of the day--and on a day when you have a horde of first-year students coming to conferences, you can't afford to be sour.

So here I am in my office trying to think happy thoughts before my students start arriving. This is all I've got:

• Language Log comments on the new Range Rover model called the Velar, which makes me wonder: will we ever see a Ford Fricative on the market? (Click here for a little linguistics humor--very little.)  
• Speaking of language, if you missed Talk Like a Pirate Day, McSweeney's offers some other options (click here). Hey, I won't even have to practice for "Talk Like a Woman Who's Constantly Freezing at Work Day"!
• In other language-related news, I could have made a real killing points-wise the other day if only Words With Friends would accept Pig-Latin. Ixnay on the ointspay!

Hmmm....this isn't working. Someone tell me something funny--or else! (What? I'm not even authorized to issue parking tickets, much less comedy tickets.)
 

Building the infrastructure to teach a new text

The advantage of teaching a brand-new novel hot off the presses is that students won't be able to rely on online summaries and potted papers so they'll have to start from scratch with the text itself. The disadvantage is that I'm starting from scratch too.

True, I've read the book before and worked it into the first paper assignment, but I have none of the infrastructure I need to open a text to students. I'm reading the book again and marking up the pages, writing lecture notes and group-work prompts, thinking about exam questions, locating information about the author and his context. I have to anticipate areas of ignorance: Can I expect my students to know enough about the Holocaust, the recent history of Israel, or the 1956 Sinai Campaign? Will they know what a kibbutz is? What about the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock?

That's a lot to expect of students who thought a class on comic literature would be an easy way to get their general education credit, but there's more: David Grossman's A Horse Walks into a Bar is a deeply philosophical work, focusing on a stand-up comic struggling through a two-hour routine with an audience sitting in judgment. Alongside the jokes and clowning around, he raises questions about the problem of pain, about who is responsible for human suffering and whether dignity is possible in the face of injustice and loss. And what role does comedy play? The very existence of Holocaust jokes raises all kinds of interesting and uncomfortable questions.

This won't be an easy ride for any of us: while I'm scrambling to develop compelling lesson plans and class activities, my students are struggling to figure out why they're reading this often uncomfortable philosophical novel in a comedy class. 

At least I hope they are. Maybe they're frantically searching for online summaries and cursing me for choosing such a recent book. If they are, don't tell me--I don't want to know.

 

 

Constructing the syllabus: the agony, the ecstasy, the comedy

"Dying is easy--comedy is hard," said somebody I haven't been able to identify, but whoever it was ought to have added that writing a comedy syllabus is even harder.

I've taught several varieties of comedy classes, from a first-year seminar on comedy theory to an upper-level comedy writing workshop, but the syllabus that causes the most anguish is the sophomore-level literature course called Concepts of Comedy.

I created the course and I've taught it several times already, but every new version brings more difficult decisions. The problems are manifold: the course counts toward the English major but also fulfills two General Education requirements (literary analysis and writing proficiency), so it fills up with students who think the class will be an easy way to get those little L's and W's on their transcripts. I mean, how difficult could a comedy class be? They know comedy--they know every funny meme that drifts by on Facebook, and they've been watching funny movies ever since they learned how to bypass the parental controls on their parents' Netflix accounts.

And then they see the syllabus, which is sadly lacking in Facebook memes and funny movies. The class may watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail as part of the mock-heroic unit, but the syllabus suggests that what they'll mostly be doing is reading. Like, books and stories and plays and even, heaven help us, poems written by people they've never heard of or cared to read, like James Thurber and Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker and--gulp--William Shakespeare.

So the first day of class tends to be pretty awful, as students expecting an easy ride suddenly realize that they've signed up for a literature class and will therefore be expected to read literature. And the worst part is that they don't find most of the reading the least bit funny.

I can understand students who don't find Shakespeare funny: they lack the vocabulary and cultural background to understand the wordplay and allusions, and explaining doesn't always help. But I don't understand students who don't find Douglas Adams funny, or who dismiss The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy with tl;dr. 

Past versions of my Concepts of Comedy syllabus are littered with works I don't ever again want to expose to students, not because the books will harm the students but because the students' responses harm the books and break the teacher's heart. They've found Nathanael West depressing and Douglas Adams incomprehensible and Richard Russo boring (!) and Sherman Alexie both boring (!!) and juvenile, and what do you do with students who can't laugh at Sherman Alexie?

So now I'm thinking about the syllabus for this fall's version of the class, and I don't know what novel to assign. We must have a novel. Yes, we'll read a bunch of short stories and poems and a couple of plays, but at some point we need to submit to the discipline of reading a big fat book that helps to expand our understanding of comedy in literature and culture.

Russo's Straight Man works well because it deals directly with rhetorical use of comedy in the midst of a madcap, moving series of events in the life of an English professor, but it's getting dated and there's a bit of casual racism toward the end that gets less funny every time I read it--and besides, students prefer a protagonist they find "relatable," which, if it means anything, means "not an English professor."

They might prefer the protagonist of Robert Gipe's novel Trampoline, a high-school girl with a delightful narrative voice redolent of Appalachia, but students who found Alexie too "juvenile" won't like Gipe any better. It would be really interesting to pair Trampoline with Huckleberry Finn and compare how their youthful protagonists find a path through the hazards of a culture gone crazy, but then I'd have to devote significant amounts of class time to Huck Finn's racial baggage.

One advantage of a brand-new, low-profile novel like Trampoline: students won't be able to find summaries and pre-digested analyses online, so they'll just have to read it--even if they refuse to find funny.