Criticism of witticism: Does humor belong in the science classroom?

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I’ve had a few funny science professors. I mean, they’re science professors, so the bar for “funny” isn’t exactly sky-high. But in the context of, say, an organic chemistry lecture, every wink, flippant remark, pop culture reference, or moment that the professor said a swear word became Showtime at the Apollo, and for a few seconds, the class would perk up. I may have forgotten most of the behavioral zoology I learned, but I’ll never forget the ornithology professor who told us how he learned to be careful asking at the front desk in a bookstore, “Do you have British Tits?”

I always wanted to be that funny science professor. When I eventually taught science courses myself, I’d try to work humor into my lectures and workshops. The laughter wasn’t necessarily the goal; it’s just that humor has the benefit of instant, unmistakable feedback. You can hear your students laugh. You can’t—unless someone gasps, slaps their forehead, and starts scribbling furiously—hear your students learn. So I’d walk away from each class feeling like the day’s success depended as strongly on whether the students laughed as on whether they learned.

At the same time, I found myself stuck in a state of half-guilt, wondering whether my efforts to be the affable science professor represented nothing more than a self-serving, self-gratifying way to feel beloved, and not just—or maybe even contrary to—an effective pedagogical technique. I’d especially question this choice when a student who seemed to be enjoying themselves in class would fail a quiz, or demonstrate in a paper a complete lack of understanding of a topic about which we’d just finished joking—and, I had incorrectly assumed, learning.

I haven’t taught science courses in a long time, but I started to think about this again when a new paper was published last month on the preprint server bioRxiv, titled, “Are they funny? Associations between instructors’ humor and student emotions in undergraduate lab courses.” After analyzing lectures from 48 courses and interviewing 462 students, the researchers concluded that “students who perceived their instructor to be humorous reported greater pleasant emotions and fewer unpleasant emotions.” Or, to present the same conclusion differently from the way it has to be written in an academic journal article, laughter—wait for it—feels nice.

The paper also concludes that humor is subjective, which I think we all know in a theoretical sense, but regularly forget in a practical sense. The researchers recorded hours of lectures, reviewed their transcripts, and noted the bits they thought were attempts at levity. But when they asked the students to rate the humor in the lectures, they found a significant gap between what the researchers, and the students, found funny.

Maybe that disconnect exists at least in part because the students had the simple advantage of being there. It’s not a stretch to say a transcript of a recording of a lecture strips out the crucial holistic feeling of sitting in the lecture hall. It also ignores the other pressures in the students’ minds, under the assumption that the joke itself is everything: A room full of undergraduates panicking about an upcoming exam, or pissed off about last night’s overlong problem set, might think lightheartedness comes off as oblivious.

Or maybe, most importantly, students might miss a joke if they’re busy trying to digest the science.

The study doesn’t ask, or attempt to answer, the question I wrestled with: It examines the relationship between humor and students’ emotions, but it stops short of associating these emotions with academic success, instead citing earlier work that associates “instructor immediacy behaviors” (e.g., making jokes) with “academic engagement.” If giving the students a pleasant classroom experience is the goal, it goes without saying that their teachers should strive to make them smile. The study I’d like to see, however, would ask whether the students learn more when they’re happy. Laughs per minute versus points per exam. A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, “Why the long face? Is it because of divergent evolution that prioritized molar surface area to support the fibrous diet of herbivores? Explain in a short paragraph.”

For reasons that will never make sense to anyone, especially my wife who reads Marie Kondo, I still have my old college notebooks. I opened them recently, and while I reminisced—“Look at all the science I used to know and now have completely forgotten!”—I tried to find any correlation between the material I remember best and the professors I had found funniest. The result, of course, is that I remember as little about the professors as I do about the classes, because I’m old, and I took most of the notes while on 2 or 3 hours of sleep. What I did find, however, were lots of jokes—not in the notes, but in the margins.

Apparently my way to maintain a pleasant classroom experience was to self-medicate, drawing little cartoons, making wordplay, huh-huh-ing about science or math terms with inappropriate connotations (ah, the classic integral of e to the power of x). No one ever saw these; they were purely my way of keeping myself entertained—which means I must have derived a benefit from keeping my brain at a baseline level of entertainment. Or maybe I’m just easily distractable, and the reason I don’t remember the science isn’t because I’m old, it’s because I spent the lectures doodling jokes.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to repeat the published study, in a very limited way, with N = 1: my 11-year-old. He started to tell me about one of his science teachers who constantly made jokes, so I asked him, “Do you think that gives the students a more pleasant experience?”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he answered, “because otherwise the teacher’s just yapping.”

The effectiveness of humor in pedagogy may be no more complicated than that: Students appreciate comedy in science class because, for just a moment, we instructors stop yapping. Maybe that’s the lesson here: Science is difficult, lectures can be boring, and even if we can’t turn every class into a headliner set, we can at least remember that our students would appreciate it if we add something, even a small something like a joke, to periodically pause our yap.

And if you’re looking for a way to reward yourself when the class is over, you can go home and try one more feature of comedy clubs: a two-drink minimum.

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