{"id":67019,"date":"2012-10-11T09:05:30","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T13:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=67019"},"modified":"2012-10-11T09:05:30","modified_gmt":"2012-10-11T13:05:30","slug":"are-you-joking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/10\/are-you-joking\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Joking?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Eduardo<\/a>
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi and Manuela Wagner study how humor is used in the classroom and across cultures. (Christine Buckley\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Think about your favorite professor or teacher.<\/p>\n

Now, think about why you liked him or her. Did he explain things clearly? Was she animated and passionate about the subject material? Did you really love the course content?<\/p>\n

Most of all, was he or she funny?<\/p>\n

Manuela Wagner and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, associate professors in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, are interested in how humor is used in teaching. Their studies involve not only how humor affects students\u2019 learning, but how it can do so in the foreign language classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re interested in the differences in humor across languages, and also across cultures,\u201d says Wagner. \u201cWe also want to know: How is humor being used as a pedagogical tool?\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite a wealth of studies on how humor is used in classrooms, the professors point out that little is known about the use of humor in language classes. Spontaneous humor is hard to study in the first place, says Wagner.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the intersection of a lot of disciplines \u2013 pedagogy, psychology, linguistics and languages,\u201d she says. \u201cHumor is a multifaceted subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

Classroom funnies<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like watching a comedic movie in another language with subtitles, humor in the language classroom could be perceived as not funny at all. So do language teachers attempt to be funny?<\/p>\n

Wagner, who is from Austria, and Urios-Aparisi, who grew up in Spain, speak German and Spanish, respectively. They began collaborating when they received a 2005 Teachers for a New Era<\/a> grant, and today their research focuses on how teachers use humor in middle-, high-school and college German and Spanish classes.<\/p>\n

The researchers study humor in local classrooms by videotaping and observing students\u2019 reactions. They developed a complex coding scheme that lets them study different facets of humor.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you like a teacher, you might be more eager to learn,\u201d says Urios-Aparisi. Although, he points out, not all humor is endearing. For example, some people use humor to put other people down, which could have opposite consequences.<\/p>\n

The professors\u2019 research is ongoing, but their preliminary results show that humor may be used less often and with less variety in middle schools than in a college setting. Language teachers also vary widely in their use of humor \u2013 in some classes humor is the rule, but in others it\u2019s the exception.<\/p>\n

Wagner and Urios-Aparisi also applied their knowledge of language roles to a more consistent source of humor. Once they had developed their classroom coding scheme, they wanted to try it out on something more consistent, like a television show. Their choice? Sex and the City.<\/p>\n

Scripted humor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Apart from language and cultural effects on humor, the researchers are interested in the prosody, or pitch and intonation of a person\u2019s voice, used in humorous exchanges.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we use humor, do we mark it in any way? Does the way we speak make it apparent we\u2019re trying to be humorous?\u201d asks Wagner. Specific types of intonation and pauses in speech could be a signal that the speaker is trying to be funny, she says.<\/p>\n

Because the show is scripted, the linguistic features would be easier to study and might be more pronounced than they are in everyday life, the researchers say.<\/p>\n

So Wagner and Urios-Aparisi analyzed patterns of pitch used by the show\u2019s four main characters: Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte.<\/p>\n

They found that the character Miranda, whose personality is sarcastic and ironic, had the lowest pitch spectrum in her speech. Samantha, who is seen as dramatic and bold, used a wide spectrum of speech tones, speaking in high and low pitches in different instances. Carrie and Charlotte, often seen as the \u201cstraight\u201d women in performance terms, had pitches somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n

Urios-Aparisi says that their findings reinforce the prototypes behind certain kinds of humor, like irony and exaggeration. Even though the show is scripted, people do tend to use specific types of humor roles in their lives, just as teachers might in a classroom.<\/p>\n

Wagner speculates that they may have changed the game for the way women approach humor.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was so popular that it might have caused societal changes,\u201d she says. \u201cTraditionally it\u2019s been taboo for young middle class women to talk about sex in public. Do women talk about these things more freely now?\u201d<\/p>\n

And their studies, they both admit, have made them a little more open to humor. Wagner says that since she started studying humor, she is less judgmental about some types of humor.<\/p>\n

Urios-Aparisi, however, is a bit more subtle.<\/p>\n

\u201cI find a lot of things funny. I might not laugh, but I do think things are funny,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research into the way teachers use humor in the classroom proves enlightening<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":66688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[56],"class_list":["post-67019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 00:57:56","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67019"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67072,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67019\/revisions\/67072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/66688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67019"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=67019"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=67019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}