I love to laugh, and I cannot imagine teaching in a classroom without laughter. Whether students are laughing with me or, yes, sometimes at me—including when I intentionally exaggerate to make points or to concede a misstatement—I take laughter as a win. (The only target absolutely off limits is making fun of a student, wisdom I recall receiving at the AALS baby-law-prof conference from crimprof Andy Leipold, a perennial outstanding teacher award winner.)
Still, given what we teach, one must of course be thoughtful. Take, for example, systemic racism in policing. Decades ago, I often broke the ice—moved students from the ‘closed mode’ to the ‘open mode’ (more on this in a moment)—with a set of clips from The Family Guy. In one, after discovering and publishing that he had a black ancestor, Peter experiences ‘driving while black.’
Officer: Hey, you’re that black guy I saw on the news conference, ain’t you.
Peter: Uh, yeah, that’s me.
Officer [into radio]: This is car 15. I’m gonna need backup. I’ve got a stolen vehicle here.
Peter: But this is my car.
Officer: Suspect’s getting belligerent.
Peter: What?
Officer: Officer down. [Falls down, as if struck or shot.]
In another, Peter and Cleveland receive drastically different responses from an officer who stops them on a road trip. In another, a police van with “the latest in law enforcement technology” can physically detain a suspect, and it has prejudice built right in. (For those educators who are interested, the clips are available on the Crimprof Multipedia.)
Whether or not using these clips was a wise technique is not for me to say, but those classes turned into rich and engaging discussions that were often some of the most poignant of the term.
But times change. And I change. And—again whether wise or not—I do not show those anymore. I do still use a quick gag from the trailer of Men in Black II:
Agent J (Will Smith): Hop in.
[A driverless car pulls up, and its dummy ‘driver’ is sucked into the steering wheel.]
Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones): Does that come standard?
Agent J: Actually, it came with a black dude, but he kept getting pulled over.
And I do still use Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs being ejected from an NBA game after receiving two technical fouls while sitting on the bench, combined with studies showing there was, at the time, seemingly also ‘dribbling while black.’
And then I continue on to less humorous materials.
But, again, I reevaluate all such humor every term, and I’m sure I get it wrong, no matter how hard I try. And there have certainly been years where the issues seem so raw that any humor seems tone deaf, and I cut it entirely.
But I’m wary of that absolutist solution very often, in part because of a 1991 speech by John Cleese that has always rung true to me. Cleese was asked to speak on creativity, and he argues that creativity requires the “open mode,” and that one of the requirements of operating in such mode is humor.
But is humor appropriate if the topic is serious? If you know your Cleese (e.g., Monty Python), you know his answer must be in the affirmative, and I think he defends it well. Here is an excerpt:
And now, the last factor, the fifth: humor.
Well, I happen to think the main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
I think we all know that laughter brings relaxation, and that humor makes us playful, yet how many times have important discussions been held where really original and creative ideas were desperately needed to solve important problems, but where humor was taboo because the subject being discussed was [air quotes] “so serious”?
This attitude seems to me to stem from a very basic misunderstanding of the difference between ‘serious’ and ‘solemn.’
Now I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing matters that were extremely serious—like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the meaning of life (and I’m not talking about the film)—and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious.
(The full speech is available here, a full transcript is here, and I have the video excerpt on the Multipedia.)
Cleese goes on to critique solemnity, and I’m less sure he’s right there—it may have more place than he gives it. But I think he’s basically right about what humor can do, even as I also think we need to be ever mindful in how we use it. If we get it right, it does seem to move people from the “closed mode” to the “open mode” very quickly and effectively, and it seems to me we need that in our contemporary classrooms more than ever.
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