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Teaching is a serious job, it carries the responsibility of educating new generations, transmitting knowledge to them, as well as helping them develop the skills and values they need to join the labor market, so they become useful members of society. Nevertheless, usually, the teachers we remember the most are those who challenged us or turned the educational experience into something fun.
The stand-up comedian does a monologue, performing a discipline that talks about a commonplace experience and turns it into something entertaining and humorous, something that creates a personal connection with the audience. This is a dynamic that facilitates learning. For teachers, the potential benefits of live stand-up comedy, when modeled in the classroom, lie in the discipline of developing a concise discourse, the ability to “read” the class, then decrease student’s boredom and distraction through entertainment.
Cartesian comedy in the classroom
Three essential elements of good stand-up comedy are the connection with the audience, the rhythm, and the timing. The physician and editor Richard Smith explains the difference in timing between routine stand-up comedy and the practice of teaching. “It’s a tough task to entertain for eight hours a day. Many comics only do 10 minutes at a time, using well-honed material that they know will get laughs,” says the also teacher of leadership and publishing techniques. The weariness from a school day is an everyday problem, and one of the best way to overcome it is to combine the method of selecting materials from previous content so that the teacher generates a connection with the audience (in this case, in the classroom) with the use of routine comic timing to put in practice one of the steps suggested in the Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes, i.e., divide a big task into several small ones.
Handling information in concise, short units with entertaining content can do a lot to improve the attention level of students. Neurologists and educators promote the theory of active learning without stress or anxiety; for this reason, humor is a useful tool for educational purposes.
Effective communication in teaching that is based on humor
Making people laugh is not as easy as it seems. You have to establish common ground first, as a basis to generate a connection with the group. It is not as simple as being likable. You need to use skills like social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and empathy to get a feed from the audience, know what the mood of the room is; if they will respond better to a brief white joke about equations, or an anecdote that exemplifies the importance of using a semicolon right. If it’s the third hour of the day or the last, if they have just taken an exam, or if the next hour is recess –everything counts when you’re trying to relate with your students.
Scott Weems, neurologist and author of the book, Ha! The Science of When We Laugh and Why, explains the reason why humor can be the teacher’s best ally. Humor is a psychological coping mechanism, a way of assimilating both the complexity and the contradictions that students experience in their educational journey. The positivity and openness can nurture learning that humor offers to process new information and manage the stress inherent in the challenge of learning or teaching.
Generating knowledge that endures via good memories
Memory is crucial for the exercise of learning. We cannot understand, comprehend, or adapt what we cannot first remember. Memory, in turn, is tied to emotion; all students may not remember so easily a full lesson about the historical episode of the French Intervention, but certainly, they will remember that joke about how a couple of cakes sparked an international incident between Mexico and France. This is learning by association.
Comedy is one of the most used resources by those who favor learning by association as a teaching technique. Humor activates dopamine and the reward system in the brain. This is the key to boost motivation and the level of recall of the content taught by a teacher. Thanks to this chemical reaction, a memory acquired at a time when the student is having fun or going through a positive experience will be remembered a long time and will generate cognitive connections that facilitate the understanding of the information obtained from the teacher, as well as the development of skills in class.
Learning, in its ideal form, is a process composed of positive experiences that lead to personal growth and the development of skills to be competitive in the job market. Humor is one of the principal ways to ensure that this experience is positive and will have optimal long-term results.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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