|
Q. What’s
funny about teaching?
A. Not enough!
Arguing for a comic pedagogy
Elaine Decker
University
College of the Fraser Valley
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cartoon by Marshall Fels Elliott |
The meaning of life (with apologies
to Monty Python)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s
Cradle, “mud as man” tries to figure out why
he has been born into the world, and so he asks God.
God ducks the question, leaving Vonnegut’s “man” to
create his own purpose. The man-god conversation goes
like this:
And God created every living creature
that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could
speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked
around, and spoke. Man blinked.
“What is the purpose of all
this?”
he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?”
asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think
of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away. (Vonnegut, 1963, 177)
Not only are we humans thrown into the world, as Heidegger would say, without an articulation of God’s
purpose, we in turn throw our children into schools with
some general expectation that they will there experience
life as individuals and members of society, and come
to know their purpose, or come to think of one. We generally
expect, too, that teachers will help students with this
profound work, though Vonnegut would likely note that
there isn’t a guidebook for teaching purpose either.
A la Vonnegut, Warnke cautions:
that we are always involved in interpretations
and that we can have no access to anything like “the
truth”
about justice, the self, reality, or the “moral law.” Our
notions of these
“truths” are rather conditioned by the cultures to which we belong
and the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. Hence, we must
face the fact of our finitude and the utterly contingent character of our effort
to understand. (Warnke 1987, 3)
Given “the fact of our finitude
and the utterly contingent character of our effort to understand,” where
do teachers begin? Where, especially, do beginning teachers
begin? Smith asks, “how shall [we] proceed pedagogically
after we have given up the presumption of ever being able
to define in unequivocal foundational terms all of the
key referents in our professional lexicon?” (1999,
28)
One possibility is to proceed in the tradition
of the fool, the trickster, and the clown; they stare ambiguity
and contingency in the face and neither panic nor fall
back on old patterns. They laugh, using a sense-making
perspective that has been documented across cultures since
Egyptian civilization. Fools have given up presumption,
working instead with a professional lexicon that includes
judgment, imagination, flexibility, courage, and commitment.
How could a teacher education program incorporate these
fools’
tools? And why should it
do so? Why should we take a comic view of something as
difficult and consequential as becoming a teacher?
I argue that we teachers should develop
our comic spirits precisely because teaching,
like being, is difficult, contextual, and grounded in judgment.
Getting too serious and too certain too soon is a recipe
for failure.
The rationality of foolishness
One of the first theories about why we laugh originated with Kant (1724-1804) and saw refinements
by Schopenhauer (1788-1860). According to this theory,
it is our human ability to reason that causes us to laugh
when we encounter the unreasonable, that is things and
experiences that are but cannot be because they do not match our previously reasoned conditions or categories.
Kant had argued that laughter was the result when expectations
disappeared into nothingness, but Schopenhauer proposed
that the expectations did not disappear. Rather they
were transformed into something else. Provine explains:
To Schopenhauer, laughter arises from
the perceived mismatch between the physical perception
and abstract representation of some thing, person, or action,
a concept that dates back to Aristotle. Our success at
incongruity detection is celebrated with laughter. (Provine
2000, 13)
Detecting an incongruity is one thing,
and living with it is another. The very maintenance of
our belief in our own reason may depend on our ability
to laugh at reason’s limitations as we encounter
the inevitable and frequent occurrences that cannot be
explained in reasonable terms. We need a way to accept
the failure of our perception. This way is laughter.
Apparently we do more than merely accept
this failure. Gutwirth writes of our “joyful embrace
of ambiguity” and quotes Schopenhauer himself as
describing the triumph of perception over reflection as
“delightful.” Gutwirth elaborates, “Laughter is thus that
privileged condition: the joyous awareness
of our finitude. [or as his friend pointed out, is a sop to the superiority
theory] it is my joyous awareness of your finitude” (1993, 121).
The embrace of topsy turvy has been celebrated
in literature, music, theater, festivals, and drag shows
throughout history. The Roman Feast of Saturnalia and the
medieval feast of fools stood the formal order of society
on its head as slaves became masters for the day, and madness
of all kinds was expressed in song and dance. Gutwirth
(1993) argues that these celebrations make it easier for
us as individuals to cope with incongruity, and create
a public disorder within acceptable boundaries by conscripting
laughter to the purpose of social control.
Meeker points out that the original purpose
of the comic was to cope, to manage the day-to-day, rather
than to aspire to greatness:
Comus [the Greek god of fertility whose
name was the root of comedy] was content to leave matters
of great intellectual import to Apollo and gigantic passions
to Dionysus while he busied himself with the maintenance
of the commonplace conditions that are friendly to life.
Maintaining equilibrium among living things and restoring
it once it had been lost, are Comus’s special talents,
and they are shared by the many comic heroes who follow
the god’s example. (Meeker, 972, 25)
While laughter in the face of great challenge
might signal that we are giving up, it more likely means
we are giving in; giving in to being mortal, giving in
to being affected as much by circumstance as by agency,
giving in to our responsibility to make the best possible
judgment even knowing that it might not be the best possible
judgment. Teachers must confront these tensions because
learning itself is both an exercise of great intellectual
import and an exercise
in coping with incongruity, but requiring justified choices
nonetheless. It works like this.
We learners already know some “stuff”;
the teacher introduces some new or different stuff, or
moves us and our stuff into a new situation which creates
an expanded or unfamiliar context for our stuff, or she
invites us to apply our stuff to an unusual purpose. These
elements introduce ambiguity. We embrace that ambiguity
with courage and imagination; we learn new things about
our old stuff; we learn new stuff. We take our new stuff
to the next incongruous place, and so on. We alternate
between imbalance and equilibrium, never returning to our
original stuff, but never separating entirely from it either.
It’s scary and often confusing. We do it formally
in schools; we do it moment-to-moment as we work out our
life’s purpose. We neither cause our life nor does
it cause us; we are mutually constitutive of our reason
for being. We laugh because we understand the simplicity
and the profundity of this awareness.
Hyers describes the “humorous remark
or comic gesture [as] the footnote to every pious act and
statement of belief that reminds us of our humanity, our
mortality, our finiteness and fallibility, our foolishness”
(1981, 52), nonetheless, we are not destroyed by learning
that we are not the gods. Gelven argues, however, that
laughter is not a demonstration of our foolishness; by
recognizing folly we demonstrate our rationality.
Only the rational can be foolish. To
say this is neither sophistry nor cleverness, nor is it
an enigma; it is rather the ineluctable and ironic truth.
Only those endowed with the faculty of reason are capable
of being foolish and recognizing folly, and consequently
they alone are enabled to respond to this self-discovery
by means of what is perhaps the most curious manifestation
of reflective reason, laughter. (Gelven 2000, 1)
The beginning teacher is a learner living
in multiple ambiguous contexts and relationships simultaneously.
It may seem rational, at first, to try to clear away some
of the influences, or to try to organize them into a fixed
and eternally reliable pattern. Gelven’s interpretation
of rationality would suggest that the ambiguities and contradictions
be recognized, laughed at, and included in the judgments
that must be made with confidence, but not certainty. Greene
describes this as breaking with the mechanical life:
If teachers today are to initiate young
people into an ethical existence, they themselves must
attend more fully than they normally have to their own
lives and its requirements; they have to break with the
mechanical life, to overcome their own submergence in the
habitual, even in what they conceive to be the virtuous,
and ask the “why” with which learning and moral
reasoning begin. (Greene 1978, 46)
The fools use laughter as a way to break
their submergence in the habitual, and to point out to
others where the habitual has become dangerously restrictive.
It was the foolish observation of a child that revealed
that the emperor was parading through town in his knickers,
while his ministers were submerged in their habitual sycophantic
behavior! In teacher education, student teachers might
practice breaking with their mechanical lives by taking
opportunities to become what Rogers calls, “humor-conscious”:
The humor-conscious teacher uses resource
materials that offer rich opportunities for the development
of flexibility, spontaneity, unconventionality, playfulness,
shrewdness, and humility, the characteristics essential
to the humorous outlook or frame of mind. (Rogers 1984,
49)
Contrast these rich opportunities with
Glazer’s commentary on schools, an observation that
certainly doesn’t make him laugh:
Sadly, our current education system,
rather than cultivating our sense of openness and engagement,
instead heightens our feelings of isolation and insulation.
School, especially as inculturation, builds up preconceptions,
expectations, and rigid notions of order and behavior.
It breaks down our experience of an alive whole into an endless array
of categories, taxonomies, concepts, criteria and evaluative
judgments. These categories are then studied, almost exclusively,
using conceptual and material approaches.
Through approaching the world in this
fashion, with each year of schooling our spirit, and the
sense of aliveness and richness of the world deflate. This
should not be the case. (Glazer 1999, 82)
Humor-conscious teaching
Humor-conscious teachers intentionally
invoke students’
imaginations and sense of play to invite them into a spirited
and lively investigation of the richness of the world.
Hertzler’s description of an individual
with a sense of humor reads like a summary of the capacities
one requires to think of a purpose for life, and act upon
that purpose, the daunting task which teachers attempt
to address with their students:
The person with a sense of humor is able
to play his important roles in social life because of certain
rather typical characteristics and abilities. He is realistic;
he sees persons and situations as they are; he is not confused
or flimflammed. He gets behind the fictions, shams, and
pretenses. He is in large measure able to free himself
from his own subjectivities and uncertainties and objectively
view other persons and social actions and conditions. Furthermore,
he has a variety of attitudes and perspectives towards
life, is not inflexible or bound down. He is imaginative
and cognitively creative. Also, a sense of proportion,
as he views the many angles and situations, governs his
reaction to them. By no means least, he can be playful
about serious situations. (Hertzler 1970, 82)
Given this evidence, it seems rational
for teachers to explore laughter as a pedagogical tool.
Elbow encourages it, saying, “The qualities of play
and fooling around must be helped to flourish. We now see
why children and poets are good at it,” (1986, 30),
as does Davies, “And is not this the true end of
scholarship? It is to make us wise, of course, but what
is the use of being wise if we are not sometimes merry?” (1972,
221).
What exactly does a comic pedagogy involve?
Dillon describes pedagogy as “planned behavior that
is adjusted in the process of enacting it.”
He continues, characterizing pedagogical action as rooted
in both understanding and welcoming:
The first pedagogical act is to understand.…Informed
by our understanding, practice moves us to take action
before, during, and after a student asks a question. First
we provide for student questions, making systematic room
for them in our classroom, inviting them in, and awaiting
them patiently. Next we welcome them when they come, listening
and attending to them as they are being asked. Then we
sustain the student and the question in the asking. (Dillon
1988, 7)
Dillon does not suggest that we move the
student to the right answer, but that we sustain the student and the question until they have reached a place of understanding
that satisfies standards of inquiry. Most teachers share
Dillon’s recognition that the profession of teaching
is, like understanding itself, contingent, and that teaching
is also a question that must be sustained. In the absence
of a clear right way, Nussbaum says we must adjust our “image
of learning” and “stress responsiveness and
an attention to complexity; … discourage[ing] the
search for the simple, and above all, for the reductive” (1986,
96).
A comic pedagogy not only attends to complexity
and discourages the search for the simple. It actually
celebrates complexity by actively interpreting each experience
from different viewpoints. It automatically rejects the
simple or obvious solution, embracing instead the punch
line, the unexpected, the clearly counter-intuitive option.
It accepts as rational, momentarily at least, a situation
that rationally cannot be. It practices a way of being
that is constantly open to the possibility of another way
of being. Its aims are to highlight “those few brief
moments when one’s lived burdens can be shown to
have their source in too limited a view of things”
(Smith 1999, 29), and to laugh our way into another view—a
wider view.
One way to expand one’s limited
view is to look directly at the world through a comic lens
by reading funny books, studying cartoons, attending comic
performances and hanging out with young children. Richard
Lederer, a collector of comic misspeak, points out that
unintentional comedy such as the gaffes created by multiple
meanings in these real headlines “lift the message
from the blandly literal to the sublimely absurd” and
make it obvious that interpretation is an open-ended task:
Two convicts evade noose; jury hung
Police begin campaign to run down
jaywalkers
American ships head to Libya
New housing for elderly not yet dead. (Lederer
1987, 84 – 93)
These headlines demonstrate a foundational
quality of humour that can be incorporated into a pedagogy
designed to help play and fooling around to flourish. This
quality is bisociation. McGhee explains:
Through bisociation, two domains of thought
that have never before been considered to have any meaningful
relationship are suddenly seen to have a common thread....to
create a cartoon or joke, an object or event must be seen
outside its normal context; an unexpected or unusual relationship
must turn out to be essential to get the point of the joke.
(McGhee 1979, 164)
In a comic classroom, the teacher intentionally
puts things together that haven’t previously had
a meaningful relationship so that new relationships can
be considered, old categories challenged, the right answer can be reconceived as an answer. In a Humor Studies course at BCIT, for example,
students examine the categories, elements, and details
on the periodic table, proceed to join Tom Lehrer in the
singing of the periodic table to the tune of A
Modern Major General from The
Pirates of Penzance,
and then create their own periodic tables to organize a
pattern for such topics as sports and games, landmarks,
holidays, and restaurants. In another activity, they reconsider
the relationship between form and content by reading computer
error messages written in haiku form, and by examining
David Bader’s hilarious reprise of the major works
of the canon of English literature as haiku (see Bader’s Haiku
U., from Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables).
Students discuss the concept of voice and then perform
in groups the Little Bo Peep tale in the voice of characters such as the Dalai Lama,
Bart Simpson, Scarlett O’Hara, or Don Vito Corleone.
Each of these exercises is designed to
soften the edges of traditional categories, to show that
categories were originally constructed for some purpose
and can be reorganized as new purposes arise. Students
work to develop a wider view in an attempt to avoid the
seriously debilitating state of mind we call “hardening
of the categories.” The more students play, the more
they can play. The
more they play, the more they trust that their imaginations
are a valuable source of both data and energy to bring
to a new task. The more they play, the more they realize
the contingent nature of what they know, however, they
realize it without fear. They come to trust that when they
let go of their certainty about ideas and experiences,
they are not letting go of their confidence that they can
explore new ideas and experiences; that is, they come to
be intrigued about learning something new!
This is not, however, an invitation to
anarchism, an anything-goes or make-it-up-as-you-go-along
challenge to accepted thought or to intellectual ideas
that have stood the test of years of scrutiny and application.
This playful stance is more a humble expression of inquiry,
a courageous entry into conversations with ideas and scholars
and circumstances that are more than, and other than, any
individual player. Dewey describes it this way:
Absence of dogmatism and prejudice, presence
of intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest
in the free play of the mind upon a topic. To give the
mind this free play is not to encourage toying with a subject,
but is to be interested in the unfolding of the subject
on its own account, apart from its subservience to a preconceived
belief or habitual aim. (Dewey, 1991 edition, 219)
What’s more, Dewey argues that seriousness
and playfulness are copasetic claiming, “To be playful
and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines
the ideal mental condition” (1991 edition, 218).
Comic teacher education
How can a teacher education program support
beginning teachers to develop a humor-conscious perspective,
emerging able to be serious and playful at the same time?
There are many routes, but three obvious entry points are
a) using comic material, b) treating traditionally serious
material in a comic way (toying with the subject), and
c) exploring material from multiple perspectives (invoking
curiosity and flexibility), all strategies that could be
examined in a variety of teacher education situations.
Some specific examples may be helpful.
a) Use comic material
Fool scholar Otto argues, “Nowadays
it is perhaps the cartoonist more than anybody who has
taken over the court jester’s universal mocking function
and who shares the jester’s compulsion to have his
say even when he might suffer for it” (2001, 254),
and one of the most easily accessible forms of comic material
is the cartoon. Cartoons are available in newspapers, anthologies,
and on various Internet sites.
Serious subjects like gender relations
are examined by the mocking pens of cartoonists like Nicole
Hollander and Judy Horacek; Scott Adams’ character Dilbert comments
acerbically on life in the modern office; Gary Larson applies
a fool’s perspective to human behavior through the
lens of animals who often appear more intelligent than
their human cousins; Charles M. Schulz’s Charlie
Brown had things to say about school that many teachers
would do well to hear. Burnaby teacher, Charles Hau, has
developed a history of Canada curriculum using political
cartoons that highlight important issues of the times.
The June, 2006 issue of Harper’s magazine includes an article by Pulitzer Prize winning
cartoonist Art Spiegelman (author of Maus:
A survivor’s tale) which explores the controversy caused by the Danish
newspaper the Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons
depicting drawings of the Prophet Mohammed. Entitled “Drawing
Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage.” Spiegelman
covers much ground, addressing the “cartoon wars” themselves
which he argues are not about cartoons at all; the purpose
of caricature; the “compression of ideas into memorable
icons [which] gives cartoons their ability to burrow
deep into the brain” (45); the often dire consequences
such as imprisonment and exile for the creators of pointed
political cartoons; the subtle differences in interpretation
that may lead to charges of insult, slander, blasphemy,
or obscenity; the context—“the Jyllands-Posten, a
newspaper with a history of anti-immigrant bias, seemed
somewhat disingenuous when it wrapped itself in the mantle
of free speech to invite cartoonists to throw pies at
the face of Muhammed” (46).
Speigelman proceeds to analyze seventeen
cartoons, including the original J-P offerings,
adjudicating the quality of the drawings and the impact
of the satiric message. Ironically, Spiegelman’s
timely and thoughtful criticism in which he argues, “The
[J-P] cartoon insults were used as an excuse to add more
very real injury to an already badly injured world, and
in this at least they succeeded” (43), moved the
Indigo chain of bookstores in Canada to remove the June
issue of Harper’s from
the shelf.
Using
the Spiegelman article alone as comic material, then, a
teacher could involve students in individual reflections
or group conversations that explore drawing, caricature,
cartooning, censorship, context, freedom of expression,
religious practices, traditions and prejudices, interpretation,
and/or history. In his writing, as he has always done with
his cartoons—and the concentration camp cartoon in
this article is no exception—Spiegelman clearly accepts
Nussbaum’s invitation to attend to complexity and
eschew the reductive.
b) Toy with the subject
Previously, I mentioned the game of retelling
the Little Bo Peep story
in the voice of a person such as Mary Poppins or George
W. Bush. This game has other versions including reading
a short newspaper article in the voice of another such
as a used car salesperson, an exotic dancer, a nursery
school teacher. In this game, the focus may be on working
with a mismatch between content and tone (the article may
be about a nuclear reactor accident while the character
is a yoga instructor), imagining and recreating the tone
and cadence of the character, or confronting the source
of the stereotypes about that character. The focus could be on listening and
imagining if the audience is required to guess the character
being portrayed. It could be a lesson in courage and trust
if comic performances are not common in the classroom,
and/or a lesson in ground rules that would contribute to
a safe environment for productive silliness.
c) Try multiple perspectives
About the cartoon wars, Spiegelman writes:
In fact, the most baffling aspect of
this whole affair is why all of the violent demonstrations
focused on the dopey cartoons rather than on the truly
horrifying torture photos seen regularly on Al Jazeera,
on European television, everywhere but in the mainstream
media of the United States. … Recently, when visiting
campuses to lecture about comics, I was astonished by how few [emphasis
added] people seem to have actually seen the cartoons (or
the new torture photos), despite how available they are
on the web. Perhaps those with the necessary Googling skills
are more interested in scouting up pictures of Paris Hilton.
(47)
This suggests that violent demonstrators,
and I would argue, most folks, take most things very lightly,
failing to thoroughly examine an issue, or consider points
of view that are not intuitively, or immediately, obvious.
Dewey’s “unfolding of the subject” (1991,
218) requires more effort, more focus, more flexibility
than the intellectual rigour applied by a typical 3 year-old
who, when faced with broccoli at dinner, says, “I
don’t like this. What is it?” In a multiple
perspectives game, we expect the beginning teacher to stay
beyond the introductory move.
When we seriously engage with the game
of multiple perspectives, we play it again and again, against
different opponents, on different fields or courts, in
different weather, in different states of physical and
emotional conditioning. We learn more about the game, and
more about ourselves, each time. The debate-as-game serves
as an example of this commitment to playful seriousness.
In a traditional debate, party A confronts
party B, each party taking an oppositional stance on the
topic, and each party trying to win the debate by presenting
the better argument and by diminishing the argument of
the opponent. Listening, in this context, serves the purpose
of preparing the rebuttal. Contrast this to the play of
an inside-out debate in which the role of listening is
in ascendance. Once again, there are two players representing
opposite views, but in this game, after party A expresses
her view, the task of party B is to paraphrase that view
to the satisfaction of party A. Party B must listen with
curiosity and intensity and find words of accord rather
than discord. Party A must listen carefully, too, to ensure
that the returning message matches the one she originally
sent. Once party A is satisfied that she has been heard,
party B expresses his point of view and awaits a paraphrase
from party A indicating that his view has been openly received
and comprehended. The inside-out debate takes time, and
requires that the parties be attentive and silent, concentrating
on understanding a point of view with which they are predisposed
to disagree. This game is difficult to play if a player
is dogmatic or addicted to winning at any cost.
Another debate game is the U-shaped debate,
in which parties take a place not in direct opposition
to another, but at some place on the physically defined
U which represents the degree of agreement or disagreement
they hold with the proposition. If, for example, I am entirely
supportive of the proposition, I stand at the top right
end of the U; if I am neutral on the proposition, I stand
at the middle of the U’s curve; if I am adamantly
opposed to the proposition, I stand at the top left end
of the U. Each debater speaks in turn, stating her/his
reason for having chosen a location on the U. After each
speaker, every participant in the debate can change places,
relocating as a result of the contribution of the speaker.
All those who repositioned themselves are invited to explain
what it was that caused them to change their minds.
In this structure, the justification for
a point of view is made public, and being fixed in a position
is not necessarily regarded as a good thing. The debate
is dynamic, like a game, insofar as each debater’s
statement potentially changes each debater’s position,
both intellectually, and physically. It represents—and
practices—inquiry, flexibility, and humility, all
elements of a comic perspective.
A teacher education program shouldn’t
include play simply as comic relief, but rather as a foundational
skill for the inquiry that is learning. Bontekoe makes
this argument:
To say that the spirit of inquiry should
be playful is not to suggest that the enterprise is in
any sense trivial or unimportant. Rather, it is to stress
two key features of the process of interpretation: on the
one hand, the responsive to-and-fro movement of understanding
which is to be found in the dialectic of question and answer,
and in the shifting of focus from part to whole and back
again which typifies the hermeneutic circle, and, on the
other hand, the fact that ultimately we pursue understanding—just
as we engage in play—for its own sake. (Bontekoe
1996, 240)
The payoff
Dewey’s “toying with a subject” (1991,
218) using bisociation is known in our world by many names—creativity,
invention, “as if”
thinking, “let’s pretend,” imagination,
or research—re-searching meaning to take a second
look at a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Here’s
how it works.
Bruno
Jaggi, a biomedical engineer at BCIT, delivered a lecture
in 2005 entitled “Seeing cancer in a new light.” He
reported that in tissue, light interactions are primarily
molecular. Since pathological changes begin at the molecular
level, light is an ideal means to probe the human body.
This “came to light” so to speak, because
researchers finally had available a combination of tools
including laser and spectrally controlled light sources,
optical fibers, high sensitivity/resolution optical detectors
and powerful digital image processing methods. As the
comic says, timing is everything.
According
to Jaggi, the optical response of abnormal and healthy
tissue is spectrally different when illuminated by a
specific wavelength of excitation light, and so researchers
have been able to develop a fluorescence imaging system
that can localize early stage lung and gastrointestinal
cancer. In layperson’s language, he’s saying
that normal cells and pre-cancerous cells light up different
colours. Finding abnormal cells in the pre-cancerous
stage permits very early intervention and significantly
higher survival rates.
And
what’s funny about that? Nothing! It’s a
great idea—a great result from a great idea. It
shows that Jaggi and his colleagues can bisociate—think
in a way that makes an
“unexpected or unusual relationship essential.” Once all the technological
advances were in place, what one or other of these folks said was, “I’ve
got an idea—let’s see if we can colour-code cancer cells.” This
imagining, moving the boundaries of existing knowledge, combining ideas that
previously stood apart, is how we research, and how we learn. This work takes
courage, imagination, and humility and I argue that bisociation, or the exercising
of the comic spirit, contributes to our success. Worthy explains:
All of us experience aha! thinking from
time to time. Creative people are just better prepared,
more primed, for this type of thought than others. … No
experience will strengthen aha! thinking unless the person
is able to treat the experience as fun, a challenge, a
game, a time to play. This playful attitude toward work
has been noted in the lives of creative people. Repeatedly,
these people refer to their creative solutions and breakthroughs
and preliminary work involved as a game or a puzzle. (Worthy
1975, 10–11)
Berk embraces the playful and the serious
at the same time in his work as a professor of biostatistics
and measurement in the School of Nursing at The Johns Hopkins
University. He puts cautions, warnings, and information
taglines on his course handouts (e.g. “for topical
use only,”
“action figures sold separately,” “may cause drowsiness”)
and composes comic exam questions such as a stepwise multiple regression for
which the predictors are Eenie, Meenie, Meinie, Moe, Schmoe, and Bloe (1998,
94, 126). Berk is blunt about why he combines humour with his weighty subject
matter: “It is physically impossible to laugh and snore at the same time” (1998,
10).
Laughing doesn’t just keep us awake.
It is a way of demonstrating that we understand Kabat-Zinn’s
notion of the spirit of inquiry:
Inquiry doesn’t mean looking for
answers, especially quick answers which come out of superficial
thinking. It means asking without expecting answers, just
pondering the question, carrying the wondering with you,
letting it percolate, bubble, cook, ripen, come in and
out of awareness, just as everything else comes in and
out of awareness. (1994, 233)
Jardine suggests that the inquiry itself
anticipates that we might need to laugh. He explains, “Thus,
hermeneutics sits squarely on the same cusp as education
itself: the roiling space between the established and the
new, between the young and the old. A sometimes dangerous,
sometimes funny spot” (1998, 2). For this dangerous
and funny work of learning and living, we need to cultivate
the sense of humor, in class and out. It is directly tied
to our (and Heidegger’s) “thrownness” and
our challenge of defining and living out our purpose. Richard
Corliss (2002), in an obituary for cartoon genius Chuck
Jones reminds us, “After all, just one little letter
separates the comic from the cosmic.”
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