Page 18 - May 2014 Dell & Cannon

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16 May 2014 I Ransom Everglades School I Dell + Cannon
Campus News
Comic Relief: Humor, Satire and Jokes in
Literature throughout the Ages
Gila Aloni and members of the Comic Relief senior elective
“I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.” — Maya Angelou
Winston Churchill’s assertion “a joke is a very serious thing” brings up one aspect that many classes
incorporate into the RE curriculum: Humor in its various categories. For example, when learning
about Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Dr. Bufkin’s and Dr. Stone’s American
Literature classes, students create their own examples of satire. In Dr. Dughi’s AP
class, students are reading William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. And in a senior
English elective created by Dr. Aloni, “Comic Relief: Humor, Satire and Jokes in
Literature throughout the Ages,” humor takes a front seat.
The class examined humor in classic literature such as Oscar Wilde’s play The
Importance of Being Earnest and contemporary texts such as Robert Lopez, Matt
Stone Trey Parker’s play The Book of Mormon and Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up.
We sometimes supplemented the discussion of a text with viewing an episode of a
television series and also took a class trip to see stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari live.
In an attempt to promote the cultural competency that allows our future leaders in
a global world to interact effectively students researched and created presentations
about comedians from around the world.
After reading “Learning to Laugh: Humor as Therapy,” a medical article about the
benefits of humor in therapy and use of comedy as a coping mechanism, students collaborated or wrote
individual humoristic essays about any subject of their choice. Interestingly, students creatively devised
topics such as “college application process,” “dating,” “nutrition and self- image.” Thus, for example, Chelsea
Johnson ’14 wrote about Juicing as “the new yoga.” Julia Segel ’14, Annie Valls ’14, and Alex Levine
’14 satirized the college application process. A few other students collaborated to write about dating. For
example, Adam Chiavacci ’14, Jason Kang ’14, and Blui Newman ’14 wrote a sketch they titled “The Date” in
which events “are portrayed from contrasting perspectives of the boy and the girl. Each of them is describing
the date in great detail to a friend.” Daniel Stein ’14 wrote “a guide for dating.” Stephanie Salgueiro ’14 and
Monica Paniagua ’14 wrote about a fictive website they created “for finding your soul mate.” These creative
compilations do not do justice to the many other creative essays submitted by members of this class that
demonstrate the practical use of humor as stress relief. Humor thus provided an opportunity for students to
express themselves freely in the format of creative writing and to conduct an open discussion of some of the
issues that trouble seniors.
While reviewing the psychoanalytical underpinnings of jokes in Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious, we discussed the boundaries of laughter and the gap between actuality and perception.
Laughter can be triggered by clever and witty dialogue, but it can also be produced subconsciously, by body
language and gestures that can be (un)intentionally offensive and cruel, demeaning and intolerant of what
one defines as “the other.” Understanding the boundaries of humor in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and
religion among other aspects of life, is essential in order to promote empathy and cultural sensitivity. We
asked questions that began an important dialogue about the boundaries of laughter: how far is too far to take
a joke? What is okay to joke about, and where do we draw the line?