“The World Is Burning and We Live in Hell”: Humor as a Mechanism of Survivance and Critique

• In Event: Humor, School, and Injustice: Understanding Students’ Jocular and Transgressive Humor as Critical Literacy Practices

Abstract

Objectives: This paper presents a descriptive case study of an adolescent student who employed humor to critique his education and manifest survivance. BB recognized the potential of humor to denaturalize the cisheteronormative status quo and to make others stop and (re)think.

Framework: Theorizations of humor are drawn from several major theories of the past centuries: superiority, relief, and incongruity. This paper co-articulates those theories alongside literacy studies. I take an ideological view of literacy (Street, 1984, 1995) and examine sociocultural factors that shape how meaning is made. Because people use humor as a vehicle for meaning-making, it is necessary to recognize humor as a literacy practice. Critical literacy involves interrogating the systems that structure our lives (Janks, 2010). To understand the potential of transgressive humor in classrooms, researchers must situate understandings of critical literacy within the discursive practices of youth themselves.

Methods/Data: 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 teachers and students, and student work. This paper foregrounds interviews with one student: BB, a queer and trans fifteen-year-old who shared his thoughts on humor, school, and injustice.

Results: Beneath a comedian’s joking there often lies a history of hurt (Freiheit et al., 1998; Krefting, 2014; Morgan, 2020). For BB, humor simultaneously acknowledged the cruelty of social and legal marginalization while providing a lifeline. He described using humor to survive queerphobic and transphobic social formations (Coleman, 2023) but did not stop there. BB also used humor to respond, angrily and with critical urgency, to the same unjust structures he marshaled humor to endure (e.g., capitalistic blight; performative allyship that impedes queer and trans activism). BB went for blood and found himself regularly disciplined by the structures he ridiculed. It was easy to imagine how BB’s jokes could be construed as insubordinate, but school officials are not the ultimate arbiters of whether youths’ critical aims are met (Johnson & Vasudevan, 2014). BB’s jokes emerged from a place of anger about his perceived miseducation, calling to mind relief theories and Muñozian (1999) frameworks of disidentificatory practice (Schey, 2020; Shrodes, 2021). His critiques were defiant and unruly, illustrating politically incorrect ways youth embody and perform critical literacy daily.

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 (Willett & Willett, 2019). For many minoritized and queer youth, critiquing school is about laughing to survive the structures they disidentify with. For students like BB, it is crucial to have opportunities to critique the systems and structures responsible for their exclusion and irreverently reframe them. Mordant humor both helped BB “cope” with the hostile conditions trans youth experience in school and reimagine future reality to be less of a hell on earth.

Author

• David E. Low, California State University - Fresno