“If It's a Joke, Everybody's Going to Hear”: Transgressive Humor as Critical Literacy Performance

• In Event: The Transgressive Potential of Humor Across Learning Spaces: Laughter, Critique, and Moments of Rupture

Abstract

Objectives: Paper 1 presents a descriptive case study of one tenth-grade student who used transgressive humor to critique his own (mis)education. Santino’s humor did not conform to binary notions of punching up/down. Instead, he provided complicated examples of humor as a form of sociopolitical critique.
Theoretical framework: This paper co-articulates humor and literacy studies, respectively. The theorization of humor is drawn from the major theories of the past millennia: superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity theory. On the literacy side, I take an ideological view, where sociocultural factors influence how meaning is made. Because people use humor as a vehicle for meaning-making, it is necessary to recognize humor as a literate practice. Critical literacy involves making sense of the systems that structure our lives and interrogating them. To understand the potential of transgressive humor in classrooms, researchers must situate our understandings of critical literacy within the discursive practices of youth themselves, including absurdity, irony, sarcasm, ridicule, and even gallows humor.
Methods and data sources: Data derive from a yearlong ethnographic study of three high school ELA classrooms in California focusing on humorous enactments of sociopolitical critique. Data include fieldnotes and analytic memos, interviews with three teachers and dozens of students, and student work. This paper foregrounds interviews with one student: Santino, a queer Chicano fifteen-year-old who was never shy about sharing his thoughts on humor, school, or injustice.
Results: Santino had a lot to say about power. He analyzed his school experience in sophisticated, often taboo (for school) ways. Santino wanted to be heard and thought jokes told in poor taste served that goal. He shared scornful, profane jokes he’d told at a teacher’s expense. Santino went for blood and often found himself disciplined as a result. It is easy to imagine how his jokes could be construed as insubordinate, and counterproductive to his justice aims. But teachers are not the ultimate arbiters of whether youths’ critical aims are met. Adolescents’ critical engagements may be “unrecognized, defy rationality, or transgress teacher expectations for… classroom-appropriate enactments of critical literacy” (Johnson & Vasudevan, 2014, p. 99).
Santino’s critical enactments present an incongruity, dancing defiantly on the line of acceptability. His intention was not to amuse with his humor, but to challenge racism, cisheteronormativity, and generational power channels. His jokes emerged from a place of anger about his perceived miseducation, calling to mind relief theories and Muñozian frameworks of disidentificatory practice (1999). Santino’s critical literacy performances were wild, defiant, and unruly, illustrating the taboo and politically incorrect ways youth embody and perform critical literacy daily.
Scholarly significance: For systemically nondominant youth, transgressive humor offers a way into critical literacy, albeit not a school-sanctioned one. Critical humor is a powerful conduit for youth outrage and should not be limited to temporary inversions of power (i.e., carnivalesque moments). For many minoritized and queer youth, critiquing and transforming school is about laughing to survive the structures they disidentify with.

Author

• David E. Low, California State University - Fresno