Management Students Create Comedy Scripts on Sustainability Issues: Course Design, Results, and Outcomes

• In Event: Laugh, and the World Laughs With You? The Comedic Turn in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

Topics such as environmental protection, social responsibility, and sustainable development are often perceived as killjoys (Verlie, 2020). To counteract this, some sustainability educators have employed humor in their courses (e.g., Dubisar & Hunt, 2019; Osnes et al., 2019). In education generally, humor elements are integrated by educators into their lectures or course materials, giving them control over when and what kind of humor is used. A very different approach tasks students with developing their own stories. Shifting from "make them laugh" to "learning by developing humor" resonates with applying theater (Gauldron & Castillo, 2018), improvisation (Kaplan-Liss et al., 2018), or songwriting (Arbuthnott & Sutter, 2019) in teaching. The extensive literature on stand-up comedy highlights that humor is a craft (Ruch et al., 2019), so it can be taught and used as a key element of a course. This paper provides insights into the design, experiences, and impacts of a course in a Master of Management Program in Vienna, Austria, now taught four times, in which 25-30 students engage with late-night comedy script writing on serious sustainability issues. Students work in groups of 5-6 on sustainability challenges such as land consumption, low-cost airlines, cruise ships, fast fashion, food waste, animal suffering, or bee mortality. Together they conduct background research and co-develop a collection of materials on the problem, its causes, and possible solutions. Simultaneously, they take part in basic improv theater training, gain insight into the building blocks of humor, and learn how to develop sketches, jokes, and punch lines. Each group develops the concept for a comedy script, containing an elaborated storyline and humorous examples. Through several rounds of rehearsals, they receive feedback regarding accuracy of content, storytelling, and humor. They then perform their scripts in front of the classroom. Humor is not used to make fun of serious issues, but instead is used to illustrate sustainability challenges in a scientifically sound and easily understandable way and to raise awareness. Beyond the standardized university course evaluations, in the fourth iteration of the course, we sought to assess the short- and medium-term effects of using humor in this way. We adopted a mixed-method approach. We used well-established scales to measure humor orientation (Booth-Butterfield & Booth-Butterfield, 1991) and sustainability consciousness (Gericke et al., 2019) at the beginning of the first day and four weeks after the final performance. We also conducted a free-writing session to gain insights into students’ individual experiences (Francese & Felten, 2017). Results of this study of an innovative course that links environmental education, communication, and comedy-writing informed the development of a framework related to "learning by developing humor" in sustainability education.

Authors

• Andre Martinuzzi

• Angelo Spoerk

• Florian Findler