Beginner's Humor Writing, Learning to Write Your Own Jokes

“When one teaches, two learn.”

Nothing in this world is better for you emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, or physically than humor and laughter. From Plato, who tells us that surprise is the most important factor in humor, on down to current day humorists, everyone agrees. Humor is good. Humor makes you smarter because it trains your mind to recognize new patterns and new ways of looking at things. And that’s just the beginning of the list of benefits studying and writing humor adds to your life.

In Humor Writing, we briefly review basic composition essay forms and then study and discuss the techniques these humorists used so that students learn to create humor structures in their writing These structures are then used to add humor to different types of writing including personal narratives, character sketches, process essays, compare and contrast essays, and persuasion essays. We will learn the essential knowledge elements (EKE's) of humor writing and practice writing using these handy structures and formulas to create jokes in writing. You may expect to complete the course with a working knowledge of the types of humor, humor writing structures, humorists, both those who write humor and those who may also perform it. You may also expect to expand your vocabulary and general knowledge of literature and composition after completing this class.

We read from classic humorous writers such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Oscar Wilde, James Thurber, David Sedaris, Jonathan Swift, Gary Trudeau, Geoffery Chaucer, and others. We study humorists from different eras, and both written and spoken humor to gain a sense of the types of humor in literature and popular culture. In addition to learning about humor writing, the class also provides a thorough review of English Composition and practice. An extensive set of practices, tests, worksheets, thinking assignments, and handouts reinforce memory, strengthen retrieval, and interrupt forgetting.

Dunbar-Green’s Adaptation of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is a real nail-biter of a theory, and if you sign up for the class, I will tell you all about it.

I have just designed the curricula, so it is innovative, original, and reflects the latest educational research findings, with special attention to Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, and Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, by Scott H. Young. Adapting our curriculum to the valuable learning methods in these good books, I have created fun homework that assures you will learn in this class and achieve your educational goals. In pursuit of any professional or educational goal, a solid grasp of written English and the ancillary communication skills that provides is as valuable as gold and twice as useful. Good learning methods re always guided by Bloom’s taxonomy, so you will first learn and remember the list of humor EKE’s, then come to understand their importance, and in your writing assignments you will apply the learning while analyzing how well you are doing it, and finally you will complete the created assignment, the product of which is testimony to your academic success at humor writing. You just can’t write or speak too well. It isn’t possible.

Essential Knowledge Elements (EKE’s) compose the backbone of this class, which means that you are given a long list of terms that are considered essential to the subject area of humor writing. The concept of EKE’s and the idea of using them to build curriculum is the seminal work of Dr. Oliver D. Hensley, who believed that all knowledge in the computer age should be readily accessible within 12 keystrokes and that such knowledge should be arranged by an ongoing list of essential concepts and the products efficacy with such concepts engenders.

So, if you learn the EKE’s, you simply can’t fail. Now I can’t prove that, but I have been using this method for about 20 years and I have not seen it fail. Like the Least textbook from Wichita State University, the EKE’s are a friendly and popular way to gain mastery. Generally, when I have eavesdropped, I have heard students say that since they knew they had the list of words I had designed myself, they held the whole class in their hands since the first day. They felt empowered somehow—and that’s a gift horse we are not going to molest. In addition to the EKE’s, you may expect a lively mix of writing and reading assignments and homework with this class, including but not limited to the following list:

Journals

Writing Prompts

Prewriting Drills

Quizzes

Worksheets

Readings

Thinking Assignments

Writing Assignments

My Exciting and Provocative Lectures

Take-Home Exams

Humorists’ Biographies

Free Reading and Lots of it!

Clever Teacher Jokes

Oral Narrative (I read to you)

Unlimited Student-driven Review of English Composition

Some of you simply need a bit of a review. Should you find that your writing skills are not at the level you wish them to be, then I will provide some quick and enjoyable reviews for you so that you can catch up to the writing level you want. As you can imagine, not many of you take me up on this offer, but I am more than delighted to work with you on this.

And here is why I am so delighted. At an opening semester picnic, a good Dean once told those in attendance (faculty) a story about how he never got stressed out no matter how numerous and overwhelming the number of student enrollment problems that he was pressed with at the start of semester. He said he stayed calm by remembering that each time a student reached a hand toward him to ask him for help, he was helping that student up, always up, always in the direction of positive change and improvement. He said he had spent his entire career only being expected to help people up, and he was deeply satisfied by it. Not all the deans you will run across in your education and career will be as good as that dean was, but some really are that good, and as a group, we all genuinely want to help you attain whatever goals you have set yourself to.

I am entertaining to listen to, according to me. I am also knee deep in learning how to make all my lessons fully multimodal, and that is flat exciting for us all!

We are all Multimodal learners even if we think we aren’t. VARK is an acronym describing some kinds of learning (visual, auditory, reading/writing, kinetic). You may further research to learn I am correct but meanwhile, all our lessons are taught in a multimodal manner. Hence, I will present our class material using as many modes of teaching as possible, e.g. I will show you with visuals, speak the material to you in lectures, assign reading and writing exercises that reinforce the same concepts and activities, and finally, we will all be applying our learning to creating a piece of writing ourselves with our hands.

Fortunately for us, writing is a skill, and all skills can be learned and taught, yes, all skills can be learned by everyone. There is no mystery here. You may not be the natural at humor writing that you wish you could be, but with enough work, you can be a good humor writer.

I hope if you are reading this, you will become my newest cartoonist.

I find our reading material mostly on Project Gutenberg, and you can, too, for free! Gutenberg gives away all manner of learning materials. They have an easy search system, too. You will find the link many times in the Humor II curricula, as well as a complete list of links to sources and other items of interest to our class. It is not necessary to buy books for this class, but it is necessary to live a life of buying books. If you are too frugal to keep the books after you buy them, then you can resell them, but don’t waste your life not reading and buying books. Reading and learning is the first and primary essential for happiness.

You, Beloved Student, will surely learn to write funnier if you take this class. I have successfully taught many people who were less capable of succeeding than you probably are. You have found this class on your own motivation, and you are seeking education to become smarter and better educated, and just that fact--that you are voluntarily working to better yourself, voluntarily spending your limited and precious free time at it, tells me I can teach you whatever you are willing to learn (maybe excluding Quantum physics and advanced mathematics). I have taught people who were forthright in admitting to me that they did not want to be in an English Course. I have taught people who needed to take the same class from me more than one time. I will not quit on anyone who wants to learn.

In that spirit, I also believe and incorporate as much laid-back fun and whimsy as I can create in my classes. Being serious doesn’t make you smarter or more capable. If anything, the opposite is true, so there is no more drudgery in Humor I than is necessary, so not much at all. When I was still a graduate teaching assistant at Wichita State University, the English Department assigned the book, The Least You Should Know about English, for use in the remedial and ESL English Composition sections I was teaching. It was a pivotal moment for me as an educator because the textbook was so popular with students and so easy to use that it set me on a long path of thinking of how to teach things with the minimum essential information whereas before I had always thought it a sign of quality if I had included everything in every class that might remotely be connected to the subject or someday useful to the students. Oftentimes, this overwhelmed students, making students work harder rather than smarter. After that, I thought constantly of how to refine subject content and distill knowledge of subjects and learning into the purest, central facts and concepts needed for people to gain efficacy in that subject area whilst perhaps not also gaining a full grasp of the campaigns of the Roman Legions, even when I could find an English related reason to teach it.