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Once, long ago, the high school where I teach offered an elective course called Comic Literature. Students read and analyzed novels by writers such as Roth and Vonnegut, as well as shorter pieces anthologized in volumes including The Best of Modern Humor (Richler). The course stopped running nearly two decades ago due to lack of interest, and I can only speculate about why it has never returned. However, try for a minute to imagine how difficult it might be to put together a syllabus for such a class today.
Part of the problem is the utter subjectivity of humor. I recall teaching a twelfth-grade class where the first four works we read were Albert Camus' The Stranger, Dante Alighieri's Inferno, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Concerned, my students frequently inquired about my mental health, and they asked me often if all English teachers are depressives. I reassured them that there was a sensible reason why an overwhelming majority of what we teach focuses on the worst elements of the human condition. Simply, tragedy is universal; everyone, regardless of time and place, has experienced loss and separation.
Comedy, on the other hand, is completely subjective. Can you remember a time as a child when your parents sat you down to watch a movie that they thought was hilarious? They would roar with laughter while you sat unsmiling and perplexed. Transfer this scenario to an English classroom, and it is a recipe for disaster. Moreover, is there anything more awkward and uncomfortable than explaining jokes? Consider how often this happens when we teach even timeless comedies like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or Aristophanes's Lysistrata. Where, then, is the place for comedy and humor in the English classroom?
In my experience, the answer lies in one particular form of humor: satire. I once taught a tenth-grade Humanities class that moved along through time with the Global II curriculum. Since Global began with the Enlightenment, we started with Voltaire's Candide, which is, especially through the character of Doctor Pangloss, a satire of the boundless optimism of the Enlightenment spirit. It was a complete disaster, because apart from the complexity of Voltaire's language, my students did not know enough about the author's subject to "get" the joke.
Beyond that,...