Laughing Matters, by Péter Medgyes
Laughing Matters, by Péter Medgyes, pub CUP 2002, 262 pp, ISBN 0-521-79960-0
(Originally posted to the CETEFL ist on January 24 2003)
A review by Simon Gill, REV: channelmeister and occasional teacher of
English.
This book has already been mentioned on this list, in a couple of postings last week It’s nice to be able to review a book that has not only been ‘signposted’ in advance in this way but is actually written by a Central European, and, as a Hungarian, Péter Medgyes’ Central European credentials are impeccable. If you’ve ever had the good fortune to meet him or go to one of his conference presentations, you’ll know that if there was ever a person qualified to write this book then he’s the one.
Subtitled ‘Humour in the Language Classroom’, this is a recent addition to the ever-growing (in the most recent catalogue I have there are no fewer than 33 books in it) Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series. It follows what seems now to have become pretty much the standard format for the series, with an Introduction which lays out the rationale and organization of the book followed by a large number of practical ideas presented in ‘recipe’ format. A box at the head of each recipe summarises the activity and gives advice as to timing, the level(s) for which the activity is suitable, and what preparation may be needed. The procedure is then described in detail. Most of the recipes also provide material either in the form of visuals (chiefly cartoons) or texts of various kinds. Quite a few also have suggestions for variations and follow-up activities.
All told, there are 142 of these classroom recipes, divided into ten sections arranged around the following broad themes:
- Funny starts (“ideas about how to introduce the idea of laughter”
– 17
ideas); - Jokes and wisecracks - 11;
- Puns and puzzles - 13;
- Proverbs and quotations - 14;
- Poems and songs - 13;
- Pictures and images - 12;
- Stories and anecdotes - 14;
- Sketches and dialogues - 13;
- Errors and failures - 14, and
- Children and schools – 11
Few of them are more than a couple of pages long; some are much shorter.
The ideas range from the time-honoured (eg ‘O’Grady Says’
– perhaps better known to many of us, including my own mildly amused
trainee teachers, as ‘Simon Says’, ‘Knock, knock!’
jokes, the story of ‘Stone soup’, ‘Call my bluff’,
and ‘Charades’) to the highly innovative.
They are accompanied by a selection of texts and cartoons of truly impressive breadth, ranging from, at the literary end of the spectrum, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, extracts from Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22’ and Bill Bryson’s ‘The Lost Continent’, and Roald Dahl’s alternative poetic take on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, right through to, at the more populist end, children’s jokes, puns, graffiti, tonguetwisters, anagrams, and some limericks of the type you could tell to your granny without fear. And all sorts in between as well. There’s even a Bruegel painting.
The humour, too, has a broad range. There’s not much of the banana skin and custard-pie-in-the-face sort here, as the emphasis is more on verbal stuff (after all, we are dealing with the language classroom here), but it does run the gamut from belly laugh or kid giggle material to elegant witticisms that stimulate nothing more overt than a raised eyebrow or a wry smile.
So there is plenty here for the teacher who is inexperienced, or lacking in either linguistic or pedagogic confidence, or fears the effect on discipline that reducing a class to tears of mirth might have, or doesn’t have a huge fund of pithy quotations, funny stories, comic verse, or whatever at their disposal. As the author states in his Introduction, “the book is meant to be teacher-friendly; you are spared the trouble of looking for texts and ideas to exploit them”. However, that is not to say that it does not provide scope for experimentation or food for thought for more experienced teachers as well. Medgyes stresses that “this should not discourage you from finding better texts and coming up with better ideas.”
With the Internet, the former should be no problem; not so long ago I typed the command “funny limericks” into a major search engine and was rewarded with no fewer than 157,000 hits; “superstitions” yielded rather more, and it didn’t take me long at all to prepare the lessons I’d been contemplating around these ideas.
Perhaps the real value of the book, for me at least, is the plethora
of ideas it provides for ways of actually using readily-available aspects
of humour with classes. I think teachers are often afflicted with a mild
form of kleptomania. I met one of our recent graduates and she said to
me “I’m a real teacher now – whenever I go to the shop
I’m busy looking around at things and thinking how I could use them
in my lessons!” Which put me in mind of a guy I once met at a workshop
who had the room in stitches with his observation that “Teaching
isn’t a job – it’s a diagnosis!” So if, like me,
you’re sitting on piles of cartoons, lists of comic mistranslations,
funny
notices in public places, bizarre photographs, jokes, and the like, you
might well find something here that strikes a spark and brings a smile
to the faces of both yourself and the people you teach. To quote from
the Introduction again, “the fundamental ideas of the book are to
spark off
ideas, develop creativity and have fun.”
To read this book through from cover to cover your diagnosis would have
to be pretty advanced; perhaps if you’re that far gone the London
telephone book might be a more appropriate investment. Rather, it’s
something to leaf through for inspiration or dip into at moments when
your creativity needs a bit of a boost, the sort of book that no staffroom
bookshelf should really
be without. Take a look at it.