by Miguel Mariscal Ruiz

Humor is ironic in itself. It is obvious and we recognize it immediately. Similar to beauty, we all intuitively “know” what humor is, and still it is difficult to precisely define. Indeed, there is not a single definition of humor that is accepted by humor scholars across or even within disciplinary lines. Nevertheless, humor is believed to

be a fundamental, intrinsic part of human nature, experienced in nearly every type of interpersonal relationship and having a far-reaching impact on daily life.

Many would not find a place for humor in an academic environment, but it actually has its own place there, for it helps create a space where students feel comfortable and relaxed, and are more open to learn new concepts. Of course, the times when humor is more appropriate must be discerned by the teacher, as we do not want

jokes to get in the way and be distractive or disruptive.
 

Benefits of humor in classroom
 

Using humor the right way makes students feel more motivated, have the teacher in a higher esteem and enjoy the course they are studying instead of feeling tired from the obligation. Students do not usually expect to laugh in class, and precisely because of that, if a teacher tells a joke they will start paying more attention. Also, lectures that had a humor treatment increased test scores compared to those without a humor treatment.
 

This was found out in tests where they used three or four jokes per lesson, that were relevant to the topic, serving as an illustration of the concept taught. Later, students were asked about the topics that were presented with humor, and got better results. Schmidt, 2002, got a very similar outcome in his experiments, and I myself have noticed the same results in my experience as a language teacher: when I have had the opportunity to take time and get to know my students and how to make them laugh, the general result was that they learned those concepts much more easily than those presented in a more conventional way, even the more complex ones.
 

Another benefit of using humor in class, appointed by Ziv (1983), is that it helps students be more creative. Trying to find ways of getting unusual responses, students end up using a different train of thoughts, which helps them finding out ways to express themselves in more original ways, and help assimilate and learn concepts rather than just memorize them.
 

Apart from the relationship between students and teachers, the use of humor in class can improve the relationship amongst the students themselves, as they can discover a common topic they find amusing and make working together easier.

Humor in different parts of the world

Learning something through a joke or a game makes it spontaneous and natural, and taking away tension and fear from a person makes it way easier for them to remember anything they have learned, and another great advantage of it is that to understand the punchline of a joke the students need to learn about the culture of the person telling the joke and why it is funny to them, since what makes people laugh varies a great deal from region to region. This way, the teacher covers a very important factor which is oftentimes overlooked in a

language class: learning about the culture of the people who speak that language.
 

Languages are developed in different regions of the world, and every word and nuance has a very specific reason to be. If you live in a cold region and surrounded by snow, it is only natural that you can tell different types of snow apart and have to communicate about it, and therefore have several words for it. And if your intention is to learn that language, you need to understand why they use the specific words they are using. Simply memorizing them can be the least effective way to learn them. You would need to link the words to concepts and then you would be able to use them naturally. That is also where pictures can play an important role, as they can make it a lot easier to illustrate the concept we are trying to teach. Pictures are much more direct than words.
 

It is absolutely necessary to adapt to a certain culture to be able to learn their humor and understand why they laugh at some specific things or what are you allowed (or not) to joke among that people. Humor reveals the most hidden parts of a nation's culture.
 

Use jokes wisely
 

Now, as much as we all like laughing and want to make our lessons more entertaining as well as profitable for our students, the jokes we make in class have to be well “engineered”, placed in the moments of the lesson where the students need them more. To keep the focus in the topic, the jokes need to be related to it. Let us see an example:

Teacher: John. Give me a sentence beginning with 'I'.

John: I is the...

Teacher: No, John. You must say «I am» not «I is.»

John: All right. I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.

(Hutchinson 1985, 86)

This joke is presented in the course-book Project English 1 which has been used in Slovenian primary schools for some years. That particular page introduces ordinal numerals. The joke is completely relevant to the given situation and therefore appropriate to this context [3; 58]. It shows a practical usage of the ordinal numeral 'ninth'. The students can use it as a guiding activity to the game which follows and at the same time they can relax and laugh for a while. In this way their attention becomes stronger.
 

However, some jokes do not seem to be relevant in any way to the situation in which they are introduced. Here is an example which supports this argument:
 

Customer: This restaurant must have a very clean kitchen.

Waitress: Thank you, sir. How do you know?

Customer: Everything tastes like soap.

(Hutchinson 1987, 52)

This joke is on the page which deals with family relationships [3; 64]. There is also an introduction to non-defining relative clauses, and adjectives expressing feelings. But none of these seem to be connected in any way to the joke. When students read this joke they cannot find any relevant connection with the context. Their attention is then shifted to a completely different situation and their thoughts can easily wander elsewhere. As a consequence the students can lose their concentration and therefore a teacher has their work cut out for the

remaining part of the lesson.
 

On colloquial language

Colloquial language is what people use to communicate in everyday conversations. We are used to teach or learn all the proper grammar rules and vocabulary for a new language, but in all languages and cultures, people manipulate, twist and break those rules, either to be more comfortable, to cause a specific intentional impact, or because simply the world around us evolves and we need to incorporate new words and expressions. Take for example the word “selfie”, which was introduced even in languages different from English, as it describes a phenomenon that was not common before digital cameras were accessible en masse, mainly since they were added to cell phones.
 

Compared to formal or standard English, colloquial language has more relaxed grammar rules. People use sentence fragments (incomplete sentences or thoughts), contractions, and short forms.

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Idioms
 

Idioms are a huge part of colloquial speech (and hard work for language learners). They don’t make literal sense so the meaning isn’t usually obvious. But there’s a fine line between using idioms well and using too many of them. Use them sparingly. The same as with jokes, people from different regions use different expressions to refer to the same thing colloquially.

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