I love being a religion professor. I don’t love every minute of it (I don’t love grading), but I love most of it. I love the subject matter. I love the students. And I’m being paid for it! I am one of a very small and privileged set of people who get paid to do the thing they love. I have to remind myself to be grateful.
Over my long and lucky life, I actually have been paid to do several things I enjoy. I have been a paid preacher, a paid dramatist, a paid singer-songwriter, a paid author and editor, even a paid racewalker (if winning a cash prize for a good finish in a local race counts, and I am counting everything).
I have never been paid much for any of these things—not enough to live on, not usually enough to have one nice dinner on, but enough to say I got paid. And that makes me a professional, right? By that token, I have also been a professional food service worker, a professional retail clerk, and a professional theme park ride operator.
No one, though, has ever paid me for making a single joke.
Surely, I say to myself as I wrack memory, this has to be a mistake. I like jokes. I am always thinking of jokes. “Comedy writer” was one of my childhood fantasy jobs. I still picture myself in the television writers’ room, pitching jokes to the showrunner. I listen to podcasts that are hosted by comedy writers. I feel like they’re my friends and that I’m at the microphone making jokes with them (this is called a parasocial relationship—it’s not a good thing). When my wife tells a joke, I give her notes and offer to punch it up (this is called me being an ass—it’s not a good thing either).
With everything I have dabbled in over the years, I must have found someone at some time to pay me a nominal pittance to perform a short routine in a comedy club or write a humorous piece for some publication. But no. I have been paid to create, but never to create a joke. I have never been a professional comedian. From time to time friends have charitably reminded me of this fact, just in case I forgot. “Thousands of comedians out of work and you’re making jokes?” was how a fellow ride operator put it, which I thought was pretty funny.
This doesn’t mean I don’t make jokes for free in my day job as a religion professor. No one makes funnier joke wrong answers for multiple-choice quizzes than me. Here is one from a quiz on the Reformation from a history of Christianity class:
1. What is TULIP? A. An acronym for the predestinarian theology of Dutch Calvinists B. An acronym for the freewill theology of the Dutch theologian Arminius C. An acronym for the rationalist principles of the European Enlightenment D. A song by the early Latin theologian Timotheus Minimus
Get it? Probably not, because you would have to know what the correct answer is (A), what the joke answer is (D), know or guess the Latin translation, and be old enough to have watched Laugh-In.
Let’s try another. This was from a special topics course on the First Amendment and religious freedom.
1. What kind of cases does the US Supreme Court normally decide? A. Appeals of lower court cases B. Cases dealing with particularly serious crimes C. Civil cases with penalties of one hundred thousand dollars or more D. Disputes between Diana Ross and the estates of Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson
Okay, maybe someone does write funnier joke answers than me. But I bet have the oldest pop culture references. To my credit, though, a student actually got this one. I mean the student got the correct answer (A) and penciled in a smiley face next to the joke answer (D).
I also tell jokes in lectures. But when I do I have to remind myself of what my Opryland coworker told me years ago. I’m not a professional comedian. I’m not paid to tell jokes.
Jokes in class are fine if they serve my actual purpose, the thing I am really being paid to do, which is teaching. Jokes can break up the monotony of a long lecture. Jokes can put students at ease and help them pay attention. Jokes can serve as memory aids for facts and concepts.
The frustrating thing for us teachers/wannabe comedians is that jokes that are helpful for teaching don’t need to be good jokes. A dumb joke can serve as a mnemonic just as well as a good joke can. Even better, because a dumb joke sticks in a student’s brain like an annoyingly catchy tune. My students have a stated preference for bad jokes. Only once has a student repeated a classroom joke on a teaching evaluation, a bad (and stolen) joke: “What do vegetarian zombies eat? Gr-a-a-a-ins!”
Yes, that joke did serve a purpose. It was in a class called Alternative Religions. The students learned about Afro-Haitian Vodou, and how it is often misunderstood and misrepresented in the “Voodoo” of popular culture. They learned the difference between the zombis of the Vodou religion and the flesh eating “zombies” of the movies.
Jokes in the classroom are not fine if they distract from the class’s purpose. They have to be for the students’ benefit and not the professor’s. I try to check myself to make sure I am not telling a joke just to get a laugh or to satisfy my performer’s ego. And of course, I would never intentionally be sarcastic with a student.
Except…
Okay, to understand this next part, I have to explain about the Buddhism class field trip. And to understand the Buddhism class field trip, you have to understand the Buddhism class: how it came to be in the Marietta College catalogue, how I came to teach it, and the karmic punishments that followed as a consequence of my stepping so far out of my academic comfort zone. But I have exceeded my self-imposed word limit already.
So, you have to wait until next time to hear the punchline.
No wonder I don’t get paid for this.
I dunno, David. That's a pretty good cliffhanger right there. Anyway, thanks for this morning brightness. Timothy's Minimus indeed!
So the takeaway is the correct answer is always A and the joke is always D? :) Brilliant! As of course every student knows that if in complete ignorance of an answer, pick C.