This document discusses the importance of humor and play in education. It argues that humor fosters critical thinking, increases retention, and relieves stress. It provides examples of humorous books and activities that teachers can use, such as parodies, puns, cartoons, and riddles. It also discusses how humor can be used to teach literary concepts like exaggeration and incongruity. Overall, the document advocates for balancing education with fun to enhance student learning and well-being.

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Education and Humor
by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen

2. What is education?
Mark Twain gives us the answer:
“Education is the path from cocky
ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
--Mark Twain
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3. Early-Onset Children’s Humor
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4. Let Education Happen!
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5. Doppelgangers
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6. 2012-2013 Teddy Bear Toss
for 12,947 Kids at Penn State Hershey’s Children’s Hospital:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4ENgOxVZm0
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7. The Effects of Education:
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9. Education Point of View!
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10. Cats and Children Reading
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11. Books vs. Texting
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Children Laughing & Playing
Has the fun
gone out of
school?
With all the
pressures
for higher test scores, adults
are struggling to balance
the value of play vs. “work.”

13. 3-Year Old Jonathan Conducting Beethoven’s 5th Symphony:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0REJ-lCGiKU
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14. Children’s Laughter
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16. 7-YEAR-OLD PLAYING BEETHOVEN’S “RAGE OVER A LOST PENNY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CED7cijODg
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On the side of play and humor
people argue that humor:
• Fosters analytic, critical, and divergent
thinking,
• Catches and holds students’ attention,
• Increases retention of learned material,
• Relieves stress and builds rapport between
teachers and students,
• Builds team spirit among classmates and
smooths potentially rough interactions,
• Promotes risk taking while getting shy and
slow students involved in activities.

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Suggestions for having fun while
promoting critical and divergent
thinking:
• In social studies classes, research and
report on “ludicrous laws,” such as the one
saying that no birds are allowed to defecate
in the downtown area.
• In science classes, discuss famous bad
predictions such as “Heavier-than-air flying
machines are impossible.”
• In history classes, make WANTED posters for
notorious villains.
• In music classes, dissect song lyrics and
decide which ones are “realistic” vs. which
ones are “fantasies.”

19. Dia de Los Libros: 2012
at Arizona State University
Don and Alleen Sharing Books
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20. Dia de Los Libros: 2013
Don as Lemony Snicket’s Count Olaf
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21. Teacher burn-out is a serious issue
because if the teacher is stressed, the
students will also feel tense.
“Survival Rules” cited by John Morreall:
1.Try hard to see the absurdity in difficult
situations.
2.Learn to take yourself lightly while
taking your work seriously, and
3.Develop your sense of joy and being
alive.
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22. Good Teachers
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23. Bad Teachers
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HUMOR IN EDUCATION
• James Gordon, a professor at Brigham
Young University says that “when students
are having fun, the class time virtually flies
by, and the 50 minutes of class seem like a
mere 48.”
• Sometimes he tells students that the day’s
topic is so boring that it fits Mark Twain’s
description of “chloroform in print.”
• Then he turns away for a minute and
reappears in a simple disguise.

26. Putting Excuses in Their
Place
• Teacher Bill Haggart has noticed that students are
really good at thinking of excuses for being absent
or for not doing their homework assignments. He
accepts only written excuses, and when students
bring them to him he has the student place their note
on a bulletin board under one of the three following
categories:
– Helpless,
– Hopeless, or
– Not in Control of the Body.
The activity brings a light touch to the moment,
while also making students think twice about
whether they want to bring in an excuse.
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27. Teachers Miss an Opportunity if They Do
Not Make Humorous Books Available
SOME FAVORITES:
•Roald Dahl
•Jack Gantos
•Gary Paulsen
•J. K. Rowling
•Louis Sachar
•Shel Silverstein
•Lemony Snicket (Daniel
Handler)
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With Older Students, Teachers Can Use
Children’s Literature to Teach the
Following Literary Concepts
• Exaggeration
• Anti-Authority Humor
• Comedies of Manners
• Intellectual Play, including fantasy and wordplay
• Parody
• Surprise, Incongruity and Scary, Shocking or
Verboten References

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ANTI-AUTHORITY HUMOR
Alison Lurie in her Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Why Kids
Love the Books They Do conjectures that one of the
reasons children love the Winnie the Pooh books is
that they identify with Christopher Robin, who gets to
be an all-powerful, beneficent dictator, or at least the
parent figure, for Eeyore, Kanga, Baby Roo, Owl,
Piglet, Pooh, Rabbit and Tigger .
COMEDIES OF MANNERS
One of the most entertaining comedies of manners is
Barbara Robinson’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
in which the worst kids in town, the Herdmans, who
have even been known to smoke cigars and to steal
stuff from the Sunday School cupboard, are assigned
the best parts in the Christmas program.

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EXAGGERATION
The greedy children who get their just desserts in
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory make
readers feel superior as do the characters in Harry
Allard and James Marshall’s The Stupids Have a Ball,
The Stupids Step Out, and The Stupids Die.
LANGUAGE PLAY
One of Judy Blume’s strengths in such books as Are
You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, and Tales of a
Fourth Grade Nothing is the witty dialogue of her
characters.
EMOTIONAL MATURITY
Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No
Good, Very Bad Day makes readers laugh while
lending reassurance that people do survive bad days.

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32. David after Dentist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs
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SHOCKING AND SURREALISTIC
INCONGRUITIES
• Maurice Sendak has created such imaginative books
as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night
Kitchen.
• Sendak’s dream sequences are as creative as the
ones in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or
Through the Looking Glass, and they are accessible
to much younger children.
• Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is an especially
intriguing and rich book that both children and
adults enjoy.

34. Maurice Sendak
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35. Convergent thinking: Not So Good:
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36. Divergent Thinking: Much Better:
Somebody once said:
When everybody is
thinking alike…,
Then nobody’s thinking.
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37. Three-fourths of the time in what
used to be called “Grammar School”
is spent on language skills.
• Walter Redfern, in his Puns says that
children play with words much like they
do with toys.
• Without humor, they would lack
practice in the art of thinking—the most
complex and powerful survival tool that
humans have.
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38. Students enjoy drawing cartoons to illustrate different
meanings of words. These were modeled after Fred
Gwynne’s picture book A Chocolate Moose for Dinner.
“Daddy said that he works
at the plant.”
“Daddy says we have the
right to bear arms.”
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39. Fred Gwynne & Peggy Parish
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• The puns and double meanings in nursery
rhymes and nonsense verse get children
ready for the double meanings of words in
the Amelia Bedelia books that you probably
remember from grade school.
• Amelia is a housemaid who takes everything
literally.
– When she is told to “put out the lights,” she hangs
the light bulbs outside on the clothesline.
– When she is told to “dress the chicken,” she puts
ruffles and a skirt on it.
– When she is told to “draw the drapes,” she gets
out a sketch pad and makes a picture.
DO YOU REMEMBER ANY OF HER OTHER
PUNS?

41. This little boy leaving the public library in
Provo, Utah plays a joke by sharing his
book with the bronze statue “boy.”
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Young children can be shocked and
amused by very simple allusions.
•For example, kindergartners’ eyes grow big
when they imagine Hans Christian Andersen’s
Emperor without his clothes, and they giggle at
the sight of holey socks, boxer shorts, garter
belts, and bras in Karla Kuskin and Mark
Simont’s The Philharmonic Gets Dressed.
•For a similar reason, kids love Dave Pilkey’s
Captain Underpants books.

44. Karla Kuskin & Dav Pilkey
Two Books for Younger Children
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• Harve and Margot Zemach’s Duffy and
the Devil is for slightly older children.
• It is a Cornish version of
Rumpelstiltskin, in which a frustrated
devil turns Squire Lovel’s newly knit
clothes to ashes leaving the squire out
on the moor naked except for his boots
and the hat he clutches in front of his
genitals.

46. Suspension of Disbelief:
Don and Alleen as Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus
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• Roald Dahl is even more shocking in writing
about his Big Friendly Giant who thinks
“whizzpopping [farting] is a sign of
happiness…music to our ears.”
• In Dahl’s The Twits, Mr. and Mrs Twit are two
of the grossest characters in all of children’s
literature.
• Mr. Twit is repulsive and hairy and has a
disgusting beard that is a smorgasbord of
moldy, rotten leftover bits of food stuck to
his whiskers.

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• Mrs. Twit is ugly mainly because she is filled
with “ugly thoughts.”
• In one scene she drops her glass eye into Mr.
Twit’s beer so that when he gets to the
bottom of the glass he is amazed to see it
staring up at him.
• “I told you I was watching you,” cackled Mrs.
Twit. “I’ve got eyes everywhere so you better
be careful.”

49. David Wiesner’s Art & Max is a
clever book set in an Arizona desert.
This bulletin board features
printed and enlarged copies of
student comments.
The book can be enjoyed
by adults as well as kids.
• Wiesner said he
created this story about
WONDER as a homage
to all the artists he
loves.
• His work illustrates the
idea that picture books
are really modern
“museums between
covers.”
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50. Art and Max
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PARODIES ARE INCREASINGLY
POPULAR WITH MANY STUDENTS
EXPERIENCING THE PARODY BEFORE
THEY MEET THE “REAL” STORY
• Among the most popular parodies are
Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the 3
Little Pigs, The Frog Prince Continued,
The Stinky Cheese Man: And Other
Fairly Stupid Tales, and The Math
Curse.

52. Jon Scieszka
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53. A Shout-Out for Riddles
• Adults are always amazed
at how young children
love the simplest of
riddles and tell them over
and over again.
• They are playing with
language, which is their
key to adult success,
much like small animals
play with chasing and
fetching and falling all
over each other as they
get ready for adulthood.
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Here’s One of Our Favorites
• A girl is locked in a room that is empty
except for a piano, a wooden table, a saw,
and a baseball bat. The door is locked and
there are no windows or other openings.
How does she get out?
• She breaks out with the chicken pox.
OR…
• She uses the saw to cut the table in
half. Since two halves make a whole,
she crawls out through the hole.

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OR…
• She plays the piano until she finds the
right key. Then she unlocks the door
and lets herself out.
OR…
• She runs around the room until she
wears herself out.
OR…
• She swings the baseball bat three
times. It’s three strikes, and she’s out.

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Here’s another one we like:
•What has 18 legs and red spots
and catches flies?
•A baseball team with the
measles.

57. These stages of riddle appreciation come from
an article by J. Kenneth Whitt and Norman M.
Prentice published in Developmental
Psychology .
1. PRE-RIDDLE: What did the big firecracker say to
the little firecracker?
• You’re too little to pop!
2. HOMONYMIC NEUTRAL RIDDLE: Why is a packed
baseball field always cool?
• It has a fan in every seat!
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3. HOMONYMIC SUPERIORITY RIDDLE: Why did the
little girl eat bullets?”
•She wanted her hair to grow out in bangs!
4.IMPROBABLE RELATIONSHIP RIDDLE: Where can
you find roads without cars?
•On a map!
5.RIDDLE PARODY: What do squirrels have that no
other animal has?
•Baby squirrels!

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A MORE SOPHISTICATED
RIDDLE PARODY:
• In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten tells
about a father who asks his son, “What
is it that hangs on the wall, is green,
wet, and whistles?”
• When the boy cannot guess, the father
responds, “It’s a herring.”

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• “But” says the son, “a herring doesn’t hang on the
wall.” The father responds, “So hang it there.”
• “But” says the son, “a herring isn’t green.” The
father responds, “So paint it green.”
• “But” says the son, “a herring isn’t wet.” The father
responds, “It is if it’s freshly painted.”
• “But” says the son in exasperation, “A herring
doesn’t whistle.” “Right,” said the father, “I just put
that in to make it hard.”

61. Points of View about Education
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62. The Teacher’s Perspective:
TAYLER MALI (WHAT DO TEACHER’S MAKE?):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuBmSbiVXo0&feature=related
THE THE IMPOTENCE OF PROOFREEDING (TAYLOR MALI):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_rwB5_3PQc
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64. The Student Perspective
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65. The Teacher’s Perspective
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66. Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
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67. In conclusion, we will simply end with this picture of
two girls having fun in an educational environment.
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68. The real Conclusion
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