Thanks for the memories
Thursday, May 29th by carlaI laugh — sometimes out loud — when I read Mark Twain. My students find him boring. I put together a WebQuest to help them appreciate different kinds of humor, and it was modestly successful. (They grudgingly acknowledged that he was SUPPOSED to be funny.)
I got to thinking, though, that it wouldn’t be that hard to expand it into a unit on American humor in general. We could start with Benjamin Franklin, who wrote some wonderfully satiric pieces. There would be a dead zone through much of the early 1800s, but once we hit Twain and O. Henry and move into the 20th century, we have Saroyan and The Human Comedy, teaching a new definition of the word comedy. We have Thurber. We have the Marx Brothers (Imagine watching Duck Soup as part of a lesson!). And we have Bob Hope, whose career spanned most of the 20th century.
Students can research Bob Hope’s career at the Library of Congress site, “Bob Hope and American Variety.” The exhibit includes biography, an overview of his career, and samples from his joke files.
By the time the unit gets into contemporary comedians, both copyright and inappropriate language makes things problematic. (Jeff Foxworthy is the only one I can think of whose humor could come into the classroom without very careful clip selection.)
Students could present an analysis of 3 humorists from 3 different decades and show how the changes in their work parallels changes in American society. This might lend itself well to a multi-genre presentation.
Now, I’ll need to come up with some guidelines and a rubric …
