Taxonomies of Classroom Humor

Research on classroom humor has documented various classification schemes of humor.

Bryant et al (1979) and Bryant et al (1980) identified six-categories of classroom humor: jokes, riddles, puns, funny stories, funny comments, and “other.” The “other” category was expanded to include visual and vocal humorous attempts such as a prolonged sneeze or mimicking of animal sounds (i.e. a professor making Donald Duck sounds). They also examined if the humor was sexual or non-sexual, hostile or non-hostile, if the humor “distracted from the educational point”

of the class and if the humor was prepared or spontaneous. They also accounted for all

participants that were involved in the teachers‟ humor; whether it was the instructor; a student in the class, another person, or none, and whether the humor disparaged the instructor, a student in the class, or another person and/or group.

Downs, Javadi, and Nussbaum (1988) in their study of college teachers‟ use of verbal communication in the classroom used a different scheme to classify humor. They classified and coded the teachers‟ use of humor into a verbal coding scheme developed by Nussbaum,

18

Comadena and Holladay (1985). This coding scheme places each humor attempt into one of five different types of “play offs.” That is, the teachers‟ humorous comment was “played off” or directed toward the (1) self, (2) students, (3) others not in class, (4) course material (5) other object or thing. Two other categories were added that determined if the humor was relevant or not relevant to the course content. The results of the study indicated that there was an average o f thirteen humorous attempts per fifty-minute lecture. Results also indicated that most humor

“played off” the course material and was related to the course.

Contrary to the previous coding scheme that was deductively derived, Gorham &

Christophel (1990) inductively developed a taxonomy scheme of humor incidents in the college classroom by using a grounded theory constant comparison method. In this study the student-participants were asked to observe the teachers use of humor over five class meetings and record the incidents as they happened in a diary. After the five class meetings the diaries were collected and each incident was transcribed and combined to generative categories for analysis. The results indicated 13 different types of humor that were used by instructors. Six of the thirteen categories were referred to as “brief tendentious comments directed at” (1) an individual student, (2) the class as a whole, (3) the university, department, or state, (4) world events or personalities or at a popular culture, (5) class procedures, or the topic, subject of the class, (6) at the self. The next four categories consisted of personal or general anecdotes or stories related to the self, or

subject/topic of the course. The last three categories consisted of jokes, physical or vocal comedy and other. Results in the study found that humor directed at the topic, subject of the course, or class procedures were mostly used.

Neuliep (1991) further developed yet another scheme for teachers‟ use of humor in the classroom after surveying 388 high school teachers in Wisconsin. In open-ended questions,

19

teachers were asked to describe their last use of humor in class. From this, Neuleip (1991) inductively derived a 20-item category scheme of the teachers‟ use of humor in the classroom.

The taxonomy included five major sections: 1) teacher-targeted humor, 2) student-targeted humor, 3) external source humor, 4) untargeted humor, and 5) nonverbal humor. Within these sections, Neuliep listed six types of teacher-targeted humor: unrelated-related self-disclosure and embarrassment disclosure, related and unrelated teacher role-play, and teacher self-deprecation. Four types of student-targeted humor were also categorized: teasing in a non-hostile manner, teacher giving the student a friendly insult, a student role-play, and the teacher identifying a student error and joking about it. Untargeted humor included awkward

comparisons, joke telling, punning, and exaggerations told by the teacher. External source humor included historical humorous events, third party humor that was unrelated or related to the content, and natural phenomena humor. The last category was non-verbal humor that was

delineated as: affective display humor (i.e. teacher making a funny face) and physical body humor.

All these schemes add wonderful insight into the teachers‟ use of humor in the classroom;

however, they are still somewhat limited. For example, in Bryant‟s et al. (1979 & 1980) six-category scheme, 38 of 234 humorous attempts were categorized as “other” and no further description of those humorous attempts was given. This, perhaps, indicates that the taxonomy may not be extensive enough. In addition, Bryant‟s et. al. (1979) study was conducted over one class session. The Nussbaum (1985) and Gorham (1990) studies were different in that one was deductively derived and one was inductively derived, however both of the taxonomies do not focus on the content of the humor and/or how the humor was used. All of the taxonomies, as Schmitz (2002) suggests, perhaps are not representative of foreign/second language classrooms

20

as these classes presumably have students and instructors from the same culture. Schmitz (2002) concludes that some of the humor items may not be appropriate for the second/ foreign language classroom. Moreover, few studies have investigated the use of student humor.

Currently, there is no research in Taiwan offering taxonomies of humor in the classroom.