Good Humor? Youths’ Aesthetic Literacies in the Analysis and Production of Comedic Texts

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

Abstract

Objectives: Scholars have long argued for the importance of humor in the English classroom (Nilsen & Nilsen, 1999; Goebel, 2009). While much of the body of scholarship around these topics are posed as engaging activities that teachers can try in their classrooms, when it comes to understanding youth literacies, the role of humor seems undertheorized. How do aesthetic practices—those focused not only on content but on literary form, connotation, syntax, genre conventions, etc.—relate to issues of criticality and power? This study takes up this question to explore how humor works as critical social practice within youth aesthetic literacies.

Theoretical framework: This study views literacy as a social practice (Heath, 1983; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and draws on Peircean semiotics (1902). As other researchers have argued (Dressman, 2014), Peircean semiotics is an appropriate framework because Peirce considered form, content, and social life in theorizing the sign. To operationalize criticality, I draw on Greene’s (1995; 2001) connections between aesthetics and social justice.

Methods and data sources: Data are from a 2-year design research project which engaged diverse youth in a literary salon to discuss a wide range of texts and to create their own stories—all with a focus on both aesthetics and criticality. I audio and video recorded salon sessions as well as semi-structured interviews and writing conferences for a total of 235 hours of recordings. I also collected over a thousand pages of youth writing/composing. I used structural and descriptive coding (Saldaña, 2015) to identify the areas where youth analyzed or composed comedic texts. With this smaller dataset, I used Peirceian (1902) semiotics to trace aesthetic practices. Finally, I operationalized Greene’s approach to critical aesthetics to interrogate the relationships between aesthetics and power.

Results: Findings suggest youth developed more critical stances toward humor as they participated in the salon community. At the beginning of the salon, one youth participant, Zorion, a Latinx straight cisgender man, mentioned that he enjoyed Dave Chapelle’s humor because he liked the ways that Chapelle comedically explored racialized experiences. However, later, Zorion described how some of his beliefs had changed: “in the second week I started to look again at Dave Chapelle and how he got in trouble with the Trans community.” Zorion explains that being in the salon community helped him see Chapelle’s humor more critically and approach comedy with a “more open mind” to LGBTQ+ experience. Zorion concluded that “Dave Chappelle is wrong for saying these things about the Trans community, and that what he's doing is like making fun of the community.” Zorion demonstrates his shift toward a more critical stance. In the next week of the salon, he went on to extensively research and learn from queer comedians of color who explore racialized experiences without denigrating LGBTQ+ communities.

Scholarly significance: This study furthers understandings of critical literacies, aesthetics, and humor by demonstrating how youth can build intersectional critical stances to shift literacy practices toward social justice

Author

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY