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Strhan, Anna (2012) Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. Journal of Philosophy of Education . Wiley Blackwell

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Strhan, Anna (2012) Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. Journal of Philosophy of Education . Wiley Blackwell

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A book length study examines the ideas of the philosopher Levinas for pedagogy and education. Notions of ethics, otherness and responsibility offer a way of thinking about teaching culturally diverse students, especially given the unknowability of humour and comedy in the classroom. Can this form of ethics be developed? Can humour be ethical?

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Jordan, M. and Campbell, Lee (2018) 'The Hecker's Promise', Performance Paradigm 14. 

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Jordan, M. and Campbell, Lee (2018) 'The Hecker's Promise', Performance Paradigm 14. 

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The heckler in stand-up comedy as a form of disruptor. This can be analogous to student interventions in class. These challenge the tutor and require appropriate response. The performative dimensions of pedagogy can lean much from stand-up comedy as well as performance studies.

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Medhurst, A. (2005) A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, Routledge

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Medhurst, A. (2005) A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, Routledge

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A book the examines comedy in relation to English identity. It highlights well the national context of humour. This raises questions of humour in the context of diverse international students. This is one of the challenges to the use of humour and comedy in the classroom.

By focusing the analysis on film and tv Medhurst offers a pedagogical approach to the understanding of humour, its underlying assumptions and specific form and aesthetics.

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Mark Cote ́, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter (2007) Utopian Pedagogy: Creating Radical Alternatives in the Neoliberal Age,  The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 29:317–336, 2007

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Mark Cote ́, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter (2007) Utopian Pedagogy: Creating Radical Alternatives in the Neoliberal Age,  The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 29:317–336, 2007

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The article introduces various ways that neoliberal eduction can be resisted by utopian pedagogy. It suggests alternative ways of doing pedagogy that offers more hope in these times. While the article does not focus on humour or comedy this research project examines how humour, comedy and laughter can create utopian possibilities. This is an important area for the research project.

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Higgie, Joanna (2007) The Artist’s Joke, Whitechapel Gallery

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Higgie, Joanna (2007) The Artist’s Joke, Whitechapel Gallery

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A collection of pieces that examine the place of humour and comedy in art. The importance of different art media and forms of comedy are well illustrated and useful in considering film specific forms of humour.

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Madeline Lane-McKinley (2022) Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times, Common Notions

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Madeline Lane-McKinley (2022) Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times, Common Notions

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A book length study of the place of comedy in contemporary neoliberal culture, and how it can provide a critique and offer utopian alternatives to the grind of work and labour. The notion of comedy of utopia is an important aspect to be developed in the study of racial humour and anti-racist pedagogy.

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"What we hoped to get was something akin to explaining a joke without ever telling it. Perhaps predictably, no one chose “joyful.” “Sinister,” “ironic,” and “nervous” also went unclaimed. But Paul Chan, Lawrence Weiner, Matt Freedman, and Steven Brower picked right up on “rueful,” “cruel,” “malicious,” and “perverse,” respectively, suggesting that the straight-faced take on laughter holds little appeal nowadays. (The artists who chose “drug-induced” and “hysterical,” which might have lent a note of levity to our laughter types, are absent as their dogs ate their projects just before deadline.)"
A special issue of the Cabinet magazine with a section on Laughter. Interesting for the profiling of artists projects on humour and laughter. Of specific interest is the highlighting of different forms of humour. This does suggest that there needs to be more consideration of the different forms of humour and comedy in the classroom. Maybe some forms of humour work better, or are less risky especially in terms of racial humour.

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Martin Billingham - Listen Learn Stand-up & Speak: Educational Consultant 

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Martin Billingham - Listen Learn Stand-up & Speak: Educational Consultant 

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A pertinent site for the research project informed by Mark Billingham's experience of being a stand-up comedian and an educationalist.

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Tweets by martbillingham

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Zizek, Slavoj. (2018) Žižek's Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?), MIT Press

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Zizek, Slavoj. (2018) Žižek's Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?), MIT Press

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Zizek the joker theoriest. Uses humour to provide ideological and dialectical critique of contemporary culture and theory. Useful in illustrating the value of humour making complex theory useful.

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Williams, Amanda, Clio Oliver, Katherine Aumer, and Chanel Meyers. 2016. ‘Racial microaggressionsand perceptions of internet memes’. Computers in Human Behavior, 63: 424-432.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.067

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Williams, Amanda, Clio Oliver, Katherine Aumer, and Chanel Meyers. 2016. ‘Racial microaggressionsand perceptions of internet memes’. Computers in Human Behavior, 63: 424-432.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.067

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Develops the argument about the relationship between internet culture and especially memes and racism. It draws attention for this study how contemporary Gen Z culture while overtly racially aware can also reproduce racism.

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Special Issue on Humour and Education: ‘Education and humour as tools for social awareness and critical consciousness in contemporary classrooms” (European Journal of Humour Research)

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Special Issue on Humour and Education: ‘Education and humour as tools for social awareness and critical consciousness in contemporary classrooms” (European Journal of Humour Research)

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This provides a good overview of the academic literature on education and humour. It forms a basis for this study but has little to say about race, or to think of humour and in more conceptual and creative terms. The role of art and culture is missing from this relatively conventional issue on the education theory.

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Krista Bonello, Rutter Giappone, Fred Francis, and Iain MacKenzie (Eds.)(2018) Comedy and Critical Theory: Laughter as Resistance, London: Rowman and Littlefield International

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Krista Bonello, Rutter Giappone, Fred Francis, and Iain MacKenzie (Eds.)(2018) Comedy and Critical Theory: Laughter as Resistance, London: Rowman and Littlefield International

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A useful set of essays on comedy and critical theory. A key insight was how comedy is a form of critical theory and how critical theory can be informed by the study of comedy. This has informed my approach in seeing comedy as way of introducing critical thought into the study of film and culture.

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Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Minor Compositions

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Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Minor Compositions

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Fred Moten: "I think we were committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities was already there. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, ‘oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying."

Humour and comedy can be seen as a form of (black) study as articulated by Moten and Harney, There is an informality to humour that is best understood as everyday study as opposed to formal institutional practices.

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Berlant, L. and Ngai, S. (2017) ‘Introduction’ Critical Enquiry, Volume 43 number 2

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Berlant, L. and Ngai, S. (2017) ‘Introduction’ Critical Enquiry, Volume 43 number 2

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This is a nuanced introduction to a special issue of the journal on comedy. The authors see comedy as a critical problematic in contemporary culture that needs study. They speak about the 'comedification' of culture and its relationship to neoliberalism. This provides a crucial context to the dangers of using comedy in the contemporary classroom.

The introduction also productively links pedagogy to stand-up and slapstick, and its productive role in pedagogy. This is one aspect that is developed in the research project.
“We can’t help but think about pedagogy here. Just as explaining the joke doesn’t necessarily kill it, to attach concepts to pleasure through explanation does not necessarily diminish pleasure but can extend the benefits of intensified perception. At the same time knowing how things work can shake things up, threatening established and anchoring satisfactions. This is partly why teaching is so close to slapstick; language is always on the edge of fumbling, as real-time improvisation takes place in the land of the awkward.”
I identify very much with the idea of teaching as slapstick in a positive way. It raises the issue of even with the best planning good teaching has to be open to unexpected happenings, interventions, responses by students.

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Pauwels, Matthias ‘Anti-racist Critique Through Racial Stereotype Humour: What could go wrong?  Theoria, Issue 169, Vol. 68, No. 4 (December 2021): 85-113

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Pauwels, Matthias ‘Anti-racist Critique Through Racial Stereotype Humour: What could go wrong?  Theoria, Issue 169, Vol. 68, No. 4 (December 2021): 85-113

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A useful article that examines the use of racial stereotypes in comedy. An important argument is that racial stereotypes can reproduce relation of power by allowing through laughter the racist discourses, but can also subvert these representations and power relations.
“…whether racial stereotypes should be avoided or condemned altogether, considering the risks of interpretative ambiguity and offensiveness, or, alternatively, whether there are specific performative strategies and conditions that might make racial stereotype humour a powerful weapon in the anti-racist toolbox.”
This is a key argument in risk but potential for humour and comedy in teaching that is examined in the study.

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Alenka Zupancic (2008) The Odd One in: On Comedy, MIT Press

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Alenka Zupancic (2008) The Odd One in: On Comedy, MIT Press

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A philosophy book that argues for the importance of comedy as a form of critique. Zupancic argues that comedy is difficult to study,
"It may come as little surprise to say that comedy is an extremely difficult subject of investigation—not only because of the multiplicity of various techniques and procedures involved in its process, but also because this process is in constant motion. Indeed, this irresistible motion is one of the key features of comedy, which is why it seems so difficult to pin it down with concepts and definitions."  This has informed my approach not to fix the meaning of comedy.
Comedy is not a straight forward object of analysis.
"Comic subjectivity is the very movement of comedy. However, movement is not the whole story of comedy. Stumbling, interruptions, punctuations, discontinuities, all kinds of fixations and passionate attachments are the other side of this same movement, and constitute a—not exactly objective but, rather, object-related—facet of comedy. It is with the scissors of this double perspective that this essay ventures to conceptualise the phenomenon of comedy and of the comical."
" …comedy thrives on all kinds of short circuits that establish an im- mediate connection between heterogeneous

orders. Yet again, the immediacy that comedy thus puts forward is not that of a smooth, imperceptible passing

of one into another, but that of a material cut between them."

This has informed my approach which recognises that racial humour has be understood with attention to context, situation, tutor and students. Even then it may not be fully understood.

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Gilbert, Christopher J. ‘A Comic Road to Interiors, or the Pedagogical Matter of Gen Z Humor’ Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2021, pp. 69-88

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Gilbert, Christopher J. ‘A Comic Road to Interiors, or the Pedagogical Matter of Gen Z Humor’ Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2021, pp. 69-88

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A key article for my research in terms of thinking about humour and contemporary students. The article argues that Gen Z humour is quite specific given the students are digitally native, focused on online memes and social media. Further as Gilbert says their humour is dark, surreal and absurd.

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Critchley, Simon (2002) On Humour, New York, Routledge

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Critchley, Simon (2002) On Humour, New York, Routledge

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An useful introduction to humour as a philosophical idea. The argument Critchley makes that instead of the tragic human subject as the norm, that the comic maybe a more human response to difficult times. This is an interesting argument in the context of race and decolonisation where tragedy and pessimism are dominant forms of responses to violence and exploitation. Can utopia be imagined in the context of racial loss, violence and postcolonial failures.