When students write comedy scripts: humor as an experiential learning method in environmental education

Abstract

Humor has received increasing attention in environmental educational research in recent years as it can have a variety of positive effects on learning atmosphere, outcomes, and student-educator relationships. In most cases, humor is used by educators while students act as consumers. However, this does not exploit the full potential of humor for environmental education. This article shows how humor can be applied as a distinct learning method and what outcomes and effects can be achieved. Our method draws on approaches from comedy-writing schools, thus bridging this community of practice to environmental education. It provides students with an understanding of the basics of humor, empowers them with practices to develop their own humorous texts, and guides them towards high-quality comedy scripts. We implemented several master courses at the Vienna University of Economics and Business based on this method. In 2021, we assessed the effects on students’ sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behavior and analyzed qualitative outcomes. It was revealed that humor can play a pivotal role in environmental education as it fosters critical thinking and creativity, helps students cope with emotionally difficult topics, and supports them in becoming agents of change.

Keywords:

• Humor
• comedy
• sustainable development
• higher education
• environmental education
• management education

Introduction

Research reveals unsustainable trends in multiple areas: The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report illustrates the severe consequences that ongoing global warming will have for our ecosystems and society (IPCC 2021) and asserts that species extinction and ecosystem destruction have already reached critical levels (Kolbert 2014). Fifteen thousand scientists signed the ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’ (Ripple et al. 2017), calling for a drastic reduction in the consumption of fossil fuels, meat, and other resources. To answer this call, people must change their lifestyles and adapt to more sustainable consumption patterns and practices. However, advocating for these necessary changes is often perceived as an attempt to restrict personal freedoms or instill a persistent feeling of guilt and is thus seen as being a ‘killjoy’ (Verlie 2020).

To reach as many people as possible, increase their awareness of environmental issues, and consequently contribute to changes in their behaviors, new methods are needed. Humor offers such a method, and it has received attention in education science in recent years (Tayne et al. 2021; Publicover et al. 2018; Hoad, Deed, and Lugg 2013). Humor has been shown to have a variety of positive effects on students when applied by educators in the classroom including, for example, an improvement in learning outcomes (Miller et al. 2017). The fact that humor is highly effective when students play a passive role (e.g. as recipients of an educator’s funny remark or humorous course materials) raises the question of its potential when students actively create their own humor. This is in line with recent discussions on learning methods (Misseyanni et al. 2018; Safapour, Kermanshachi, and Taneja 2019), experiential learning (Thomas 2009; Shephard 2008), and, in particular, active learning in environmental education (Buil-Fabregá et al. 2019; Kalamas Hedden et al. 2017; Ortiz and Huber-Heim 2017). Following these ideas, to reach its full potential, humor could be transformed from an addition to conventional teaching (Ziv 1988) to an innovative experiential learning method.

The purpose of this article is to show if and how humor can be applied as a distinct learning method and what outcomes and effects can be achieved. It addresses the following research questions:

1. Can humor as a learning method be applied in a higher education context to deal with serious topics?

2. Which practices support students in taking an active role in developing humorous content?

3. What are the effects of humor as a learning method on students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes?

The proposed method of using humor shifts the focus from the educator to the students, drawing on approaches that bridge a community of practice of comedy writing in the United States with environmental educators (see Boykoff and Osnes 2019). The method enables and empowers students to write their own comedy scripts on serious sustainable development topics. It was implemented in an elective course on Sustainable Development that is part of the two-year master’s program in Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. A quantitative and qualitative analysis is applied to identify the potentials of the method and its effects on students.

The background section reviews how humor has been discussed in education generally and environmental education specifically as well as introduces the basics of comedy writing. We then present a synthesis of approaches and tools stemming from the US community of practice of comedy writing that served as the foundations of our pedagogical approach and our course. The method section describes the quantitative and qualitative analysis that we applied to explore the potentials of our use of humor and its effects on students, which is then followed by a presentation and discussion of the quantitative and qualitative results and then a concluding section focusing on the implications of our study for environmental education research, environmental educators, and for educational research in general.

Background

Humor in education

Humor has attracted increasing interest in education (Banas et al. 2011). For example, using humor in the classroom and in course materials can have a variety of positive effects on students (Friedman, Friedman, and Amoo 2002; Coleman et al. 2017). Humor also can create a positive learning atmosphere by mitigating stress students may feel about anxiety-inducing topics, such as climate change or biodiversity loss (Li and Monroe 2019; Strick et al. 2010; Coleman et al. 2017; Magnuson and Barnett 2013). Humor can trigger positive feelings and support an optimistic mood among students (Wanzer, Frymier, and Irwin 2010), thus helping them to better cope with difficult issues (Taylor et al. 2010; Peters 2021). In addition, the positive effects of humor on the learning atmosphere can contribute to strengthening class cohesion (Senior 2001). Humor also can improve student-educator relationships. Using humor in the classroom has positive impacts on students’ trust in and goodwill towards educators, strengthening perception of their competence and credibility (Wrench and Richmond 2004). This may incentivize students to make greater efforts in engaging with the topic at hand (Wrench and Richmond 2004; Frego 2006). Research has also shown that humor has the potential to intensify the effects of learning (Ziv 1988; Garner 2006; Violanti et al. 2018; Wanzer and Frymier 1999). Humor allows educators to engage students’ attention because of its entertainment value (Strick et al. 2010; Zillmann et al. 1980). In particular, when humor is closely aligned with learning content, it helps students acquire a deeper understanding of the topic (Miller et al. 2017; Osnes, Boykoff, and Chandler 2019; Ziyaeemehr, Kumar, and Abdullah 2011; Wanzer, Frymier, and Irwin 2010).

In environmental education, humor has been used to connect positive emotions with nature in outdoor learning (Hoad, Deed, and Lugg 2013), deliver messages (Publicover et al. 2018; Tayne et al. 2021), and increase awareness of and engagement with environmental education through performance (Boykoff and Osnes 2019). Humor shows high potential for facilitating public discourse on polarizing topics, helping people cope with feelings of worry and helplessness (Peters 2021; Li and Monroe 2019; Anderson and Becker 2018), and encouraging people to engage actively and positively with climate change (Bore and Reid 2014; Topp, Thai, and Hryciw 2019).

In most cases, educators apply humor either in their lectures, teaching materials, or examinations, and they maintain control of its application, contexts, and appropriateness (Wanzer et al. 2006). Thus far, few published articles have examined how students might more actively engage with humor in the classroom. An exception is the groundbreaking ‘Stand Up for Climate Change’ initiative undertaken through the ‘Inside the Greenhouse’ project that supports students in applying sketch comedy, stand-up, and improvisation on a topic related to climate change, and culminates in a set of performances (Boykoff and Osnes 2019). The course described in this paper takes the same novel approach, also shifting the focus from the educator to the students and empowering students to create and perform their own comedy scripts.

Humor in comedy writing

Humor research draws upon a wide range of academic disciplines, including cultural studies, education, communication, film and media studies, literature, philosophy, and psychology (Hatzithomas, Zotos, and Boutsouki 2011; Davis, Love, and Killen 2018; Morreall 2014; Proyer 2018). Multiple academic journals have addressed the study of humor from different perspectives (e.g. International Journal of Humor Research, Comedy Studies, New Theatre Quarterly). The humor-related publications in these journals typically employ three basic theories that explain why people laugh: (1) to release nervous energy when tension has built up (relief theory); (2) because they feel a sense of triumph over others (superiority theory); or (3) because something unexpected or surprising happens (incongruity theory) (Buijzen and Valkenburg 2004).

These theories also form the basis of a varying community of practice of comedy writing as a specific form of humor. Its origins can be traced to US vaudeville theaters of the 1920s, the importance of which dwindled with the emergence of film, radio, and television (McGraw and Joel 2014; Double 2000). Although for several decades, comedy was performed in small theaters and nightclubs, it achieved mainstream fame through late-night television in the 1970s, increasing with video on demand and social media in the 2010s (Marx, Sienkiewicz, and Becker 2013). Due to the medium’s success and expanding influence and time pressure of late-night comedy shows, comedy writing has grown increasingly professionalized, requiring specialized teams. Thus, humor has transformed from relying on the talent of an individual comedian to being the craft of professional comedy writers (Toplyn 2014). The necessary skills are taught in specialized online classes as well as bachelor’s and master’s programs, and they are covered in numerous books.

Humor as a learning method

Our method exploits the trend showing that young people value late-night comedy as a relevant source of information (Feldman 2007), thereby creating a bridge to the comedy-writing community of practice. When applying humor as a learning method, three key components are of high importance: understanding the basics of humor, empowering students to develop their own humorous texts, and guiding them to achieve high-quality results. To provide students with an in-depth understanding, practical tools and effective guidance, we synthesized well-established principles and tools for developing late-night comedy scripts (McGraw and Joel 2014; Vorhaus 1994; Toplyn 2014; Shatz and Helitzer 2016; Kaplan 2013) and adapted them for experiential learning.¹

Understanding the Basics of Humor is an important starting point for apply humor as a learning method. We offered the following four pieces of advice to students:

• Humor needs surprise. A surprising punchline can be developed through specific techniques, such as exaggerations, a twist in a line of argumentation, or an unexpected link between two associations. Therefore, when using humor as a learning method, it is important that students do not collect punchlines (e.g. memes on Instagram), but instead develop punchlines themselves.

• Humor should convey an insight to be more than simply play. A punchline can be revealing, unexpected, or exaggerated, but it should contain a message or the realization of a deeper truth. Hence, creating humor requires, and also can foster, a deeper understanding of the respective topic.

• Humor often has a target and can be understood as criticism presented as entertainment. People enjoy laughing together about something or someone (but rarely about themselves), and they experience a feeling of group cohesion, superiority, and sometimes permission to misbehave. Therefore, it should always be clear what or who the target is and why it deserves to be attacked. For example, the target might be a person or institution that is acting in an unsustainable manner.

• Humor needs to be understood. A requirement for effective parody and exaggeration is that the audience is familiar with the parodied subject. Therefore, punchlines often refer to pop culture, world politics, or stereotypes, althought such references risk being overly simplified or reinforcing prejudice. The use of irony or cynicism is risky and must be understood to avoid misleading messages.

Practices for Empowerment as a core element of humor as a learning method. We offered four pieces of advice to support students in creating their own humorous projects:

• Humor is a craft, rather than a talent or a personality trait.² That is why it is essential that students realize that humor, as with any craft, requires practice and time. Thus, it is not enough to simply ask students to be humorous or to assign tasks, but they should be trained in humor with well-designed exercises. For example, students can analyze comedy sketches to better understand the techniques employed. To ensure that students learn the craft and do not become discouraged along the way, it is important to proceed gradually and to ensure that they gain self-confidence in the process. This requires that individual tasks and exercises build on each other and are supported by constructive feedback.

• Humor is group-specific and greatly depends on cultural, social, and regional background and on age. Therefore, it is essential that people with a similar sense of humor cooperate in groups, as they can then inspire and encourage each other rather than criticize or inhibit one another. It is equally important that educators do not expect or favor their personal sense of humor.

• Producing humor requires a certain mindset and a playful atmosphere, without great pressure for results. It is important to abandon inner censors, suspend value judgements, lower expectations, and allow creativity to flow. Therefore, it is essential to concentrate on the process and not on the result.

• Humor requires self-confidence. When educators use humor in a regular university course, they must remember that students are neither in a comedy nor in an acting class; therefore, they should not be overwhelmed. It is important that exercises are presented as an invitation and not an obligation to prevent stressing introverted or shy people. Positive feedback from the educator is key. The educator should also be mindful of appreciative feedback from other students.

Guiding Towards High-quality Results is a prerequisite for applying humor as a learning method. We provided four pieces of advice to support students producing quality work.

• Humor can be provocative and embarrassing.

• On the one hand, provocative humor is often effective because it plays with permission to misbehave. On the other hand, it can be seen as inappropriate and politically incorrect. The boundaries demarcating the permissibility of content are determined by the audience, the context, and the culture.

Late-night comedy does not focus solely on good-natured humor.

• It sometimes uses aggressive, humiliating, deprecating, dark, or cynical humor. If these strategies are employed, the target and purpose should be well-defined, e.g. deficiencies are criticized, or a powerful person is mocked.

Developing punchlines should be separated from the selection of the best gags and their quality assurance.

• Although during comedy writing, the principle of ‘nothing sucks’ is followed, and there are no inhibitions, several screenings and rehearsals are involved in finalizing the gags to test the reactions of the audience and identify the best gags.

• Best-practice examples, appreciative feedback, and several rehearsals guide students towards an appropriate form of humor without counteracting empowerment

Educators who use humor in experiential learning pursue the same goals as educators who use humor in environmental education: they aim to achieve better learning outcomes and to associate the topic with positive emotions (Farashahi and Tajeddin 2018; Banas et al. 2011). Furthermore, as students change from passive consumers to active producers of humor, they acquire skills in creativity and communication. Changes in students’ personality traits, however, are not the aim of using humor in experiential learning. Such a process would not be feasible in the amount of time given and would also not reflect the concept of humor as a craft.

Course design

To test humor as a learning method, we developed the course ‘Humor and Sustainability’ in 2018 and have taught it four times now. The course has been offered as an elective on Sustainable Development for students in the fourth semester of the two-year master’s program in Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Prior to the course, students can take classes in Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics in the third semester, and therefore they often possess a basic knowledge of sustainability but no skills in humor or comedy writing. The course counts for five ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) credits. Within the context of the master program, the course was designed to achieve the following learning objectives: students should understand the foundations, principles, and challenges of sustainable development and have in-depth knowledge of selected subject areas, understanding the underlying causes of the challenges and being able to develop solutions at the societal, organizational, and individual level. In addition, they should be able to use humor as a method to foster their communication skills and creativity.

Students work in groups of four to five on all tasks. (Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the spring 2021 course was held in a completely online setting. We created virtual break-out rooms for group work and provided the students with a digital workspace for visual collaboration.) After each group has selected possible topics, the instructors assess whether the topic is suited to the given timeframe and that it has not yet been addressed in a late-night comedy show. Over four courses, students have covered a wide array of use cases on different sustainability topics, such as the sharing economy, land consumption, low-cost airlines, E-Mobility, environmental impacts of cruise ships, fast fashion, greenwashing, food waste, the true costs of superfoods, animal suffering, bee mortality, sand crisis, packaging waste, digital surveillance, resource conflicts in the Arctic, urban heating islands, resilience of supply chains and smart homes.

There are four assignments in the course. The first is a background paper in which each group summarizes the current state of their topic in ten to twelve pages. They describe the problem, its relevance for society and the environment, its roots, and its possible solutions. This first step ensures that the students have sufficient background knowledge on their specific topic to develop punchlines and storylines on a sound basis and to reveal a deeper truth. Based on their background paper, each group develops their next assignment, a script draft, which is a rough storyline and a three-minute text sample. The students rehearse the text sample in front of the entire class, and they receive feedback from the instructors and their classmates. This approach increases the likelihood that the storyline is understandable and that the humor is appropriate and achieves its intended effects. In the third assignment, the performance, every group performs its pre-final script and receives feedback from the instructors and from their classmates. Every performance lasts for approximately 10 to 12 minutes.³ In the last assignment, the final script, the groups finalize their comedy script based on feedback, and include a complete text and visualizations (storyboard, scene description, pictures and video material). These four assignments are assessed using the following criteria: content-related correctness and understandability, creativity, density, and diversity of humor. It is important to point out that students do not receive a grade on how funny their punchlines are. Rather, care is taken to ensure that they have a clear target and a deeper message, and furthermore, they do not undermine the key messages of their scripts.

We provide students with a variety of supports throughout the course. We convey the basics of humor using many examples and demonstrate the differences between comedy related to everyday experiences (e.g. Iliza Shlesinger, Michael McIntire, Eddie Izzard), political satire based on daily news (e.g. Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, John Stewart), and comedy that explains more sophisticated topics and concepts (e.g. John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj). A detailed analysis of one episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight illustrates how thematically demanding and scientifically correct content can be communicated using humor. Additionally, it orients students as they develop their own scripts. Further, in a four-hour session, we invite an actress to class to guide the students through improvisational theater exercises to reduce their shyness, promote the right mindset to develop gags and punchlines, and give them the necessary self-confidence. As well, Markus Hennig, the lead author of ZDF Magazin Royale, a German late-night show that has up to three million viewers, provided students in the 2021 spring term of the course with feedback based on his long experience.

Research methods

In order to analyze the effects of our course on the spring term 2021 cohort of students, we followed a mixed-method approach. The quantitative part comprised an analysis of a pre- and post-survey of the effects of the course on students’ humor orientation and sustainability consciousness. To elicit the experiences of and insights into critical incidents and the impact of humor most relevant to the students, we conducted a qualitative freewriting exercise. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods offers the advantage that, on the one hand, established and standardized scales can be applied and, on the other hand, insights into students’ perception of relevance can be gathered. Figure 1 provides an overview of the methods and indicates when they were applied.

Figure 1. Overview of applied research methods and time of their application.

The quantitative analysis was intended to provide evidence for the effects that the method had on participants’ humor orientation and sustainability consciousness. It was conducted using a pre- and post-survey based on established instruments, and it was pre-tested with participants from previous classes. First, humor orientation was measured using a questionnaire that focused on an individual’s ability to create humor (Booth-Butterfield and Booth-Butterfield 1991). This questionnaire comprises 17 items and has been applied in a variety of educational studies (Aylor and Oppliger 2003; Wanzer and Frymier 1999; Ziyaeemehr, Kumar, and Abdullah 2011; Ziyaeemehr and Kumar 2014). Second, to measure sustainability consciousness, the survey made use of a questionnaire based on the UNESCO framework for sustainable development (Gericke et al. 2019). The questionnaire defines consciousness using three constructs: knowingness, attitudes, and behavior⁴; each construct is measured using nine items that address the economic, environmental, and societal dimensions of sustainable development (see Marcos-Merino, Corbacho-Cuello, and Hernández-Barco 2020). The items of both questionnaires employ a 5-point Likert scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’.

All 35 students completed the survey online at the beginning of the first session and in a final session three weeks after the performances. The survey was anonymized. In order to track changes in the individual scores, each participant used a specific nickname for both the pre- and post-survey. The responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics with the help of SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows 2019). Dependent t-tests were calculated to determine the statistically significant effects of the course on participants’ humor orientation and sustainability consciousness (Field 2013).

The qualitative part of the analysis aimed to elicit experiences and insights related to critical incidents and the impacts of humor perceived as most relevant by the students. The critical incident method is an inductive method, where themes or theories emerge directly from the data, so it is particularly useful in the early stages of a research field (Vianden 2012; Gremler 2004; Flanagan 1954). It allows the collection of data from the perspectives of the course participants and the identification of situations that were most memorable for them. Freewriting exercises stimulate critical thinking and allow insight into themes that might otherwise be overlooked (Franzese and Felten 2017). It is beneficial to gather data from course participants in an unfiltered way. The students were asked to write down their experiences and how they were affected by the humor in the final session three weeks after the performances. The qualitative part was based on the critical incident method (Flanagan 1954; Cook and Tripp 1994; Angelides 2001) and freewriting exercises (Franzese and Felten 2017). It used open-ended questions and was pretested with participants from previous classes. The three questions were: (1) What was your most memorable experience during the course? (2) How has this experience affected you, and how will it affect you in the future? (3) To what extent does humor help you in dealing with sustainability topics?

The questions were answered anonymously by all 35 students. The answers were analyzed using inductive content analysis, which allowed categories to be derived from the systematic reduction of sources and characteristics in qualitative data (Berg 2001; Krippendorff 2004). The inductive coding approach consisted of three steps: open coding, category development, and abstraction (Elo and Kyngäs 2008). It allowed the authors to develop a category system that included main, generic, and sub-categories that mirror as accurately as possible the main critical incidents and impacts of humor most relevant to students. Two authors independently reviewed the answers with the help of the MAXQDA 12 qualitative analysis software (MAXQDA 12 2021).

Although the constructs applied in the quantitative survey have often been used in similar contexts (Aylor and Oppliger 2003; Ziyaeemehr, Kumar, and Abdullah 2011), it remains possible that not all the effects on humor orientation and sustainability consciousness were captured. The qualitative survey with open-ended questions was intended to compensate for this limitation. To avoid coder bias, two authors of this paper (Spörk and Vogel-Pöschl) performed all the data collection and analyses independently, while the two other authors (Martinuzzi and Findler) designed the course and acted as instructors. A limitation could arise from the date of data collection: we intentionally scheduled the second part of data collection three weeks after the students had performed their scripts so that the potential short-term emotional effects of the performances would not distort the results. At the same time, long-term effects can only be measured after months have passed. However, it is usually not possible to stay in contact with students for an extended period following their graduation from the master’s program. Consequently, a later collection of data would probably have resulted in significantly smaller participation rates.

Results

Quantitative part – effects on students’ humor orientation and sustainability consciousness

This section presents the results of the analysis of the pre- and post-survey regarding the effects of the method on students’ humor orientation and sustainability consciousness (see Table 1). The dependent t-test statistics show that the mean values of the post-survey are above those of the pre-survey across the entire sample. The strongest increases in the mean values are found for behavior (0.23) and humor orientation (0.17). For knowingness and attitudes, the increase was 0.10 and 0.09, respectively, but it should be noted that in the pre-survey the mean values for knowingness (4.33) and attitudes (4.43) were higher than for humor orientation (3.55) and behavior (3.56). The differences in mean values are highly significant for humor orientation (p = 0.004) and behavior (p = 0.001) and significant for knowingness (p = 0.075) and attitudes (p = 0.061). The effect size of the differences in mean values between the pre- and post-surveys is measured by Cohen’s d. The values for Cohen’s d for all four constructs are above 0.3, indicating a medium effect size.

Table 1. Dependent t-test statistics of the effects on students’ humor orientation and sustainability consciousness (knowingness, attitudes, behavior).

	Mean (pre)	Mean (post)	Mean difference	T	df	p-value	Cohen’s d
Humor orientation	3.55	3.72	0.17	2.846	34	0.004	0.342
Sustainability knowingness	4.33	4.43	0.10	1.471	34	0.075	0.396
Sustainability attitudes	4.43	4.52	0.09	1.590	34	0.061	0.320
Sustainability behavior	3.56	3.79	0.23	3.741	34	0.001	0.361

Qualitative part – critical incidents and the impacts of humor

The qualitative findings focus on experiences students identified as particularly meaningful. They repeatedly mentioned the following critical incidents in the course:

(1)	The collaborative work on their scripts. Fifteen students mentioned that the in-person or virtual meetings, in which they worked with other students, gave them the feeling of being part of a group, of being more open and understanding towards others, and of becoming more familiar with their own strengths and weaknesses. Working collaboratively towards a common result encouraged identification, motivation, and a sense of achievement, whereby the students experienced the performance at the end of the course as an additional motivational factor. The students stated multiple times that, in comparison to the results being produced by each student individually, the jointly produced result was superior in terms of quantity and quality.
(2)	The improvisational theater exercises played a decisive role for eight students with regards to empowerment, as it helped them to become more open and self-confident, more creative, and less inhibited. The exercises increased their valuation of humor as a useful tool outside the course, and it indirectly led to the recognition of the importance of laughing and the possibility of making respectful fun of others and of oneself.
(3)	The performance at the end of the course gave eight students a feeling of pride in having reached an important milestone. Because of the performance, the students experienced a stage effect with an audience whose reactions were also perceived in a positive manner. It helped students realize that humor generally is helpful in communicating serious topics.

Subsequently, we asked the students to describe what kind of effects the previously remembered critical incident had already had on them or might have on them in the future:

(4)	Empowerment: Thirteen students described heightened self-confidence and less self-critique. Students realized that developing punchlines does not instantly lead to perfect results, and feeling less pressure to show results allowed them to become more relaxed, calmer, and more self-confident, and to have fewer inhibitions.
(5)	Self-awareness: Six students mentioned that they could laugh more easily about themselves and that they planned to not take themselves too seriously, that they discovered humor as one of their strengths, or that they planned to use humor in a more targeted way in the future.
(6)	Craft of humor: Five students mentioned that they now better understood how humor works, that good humor needs profound background knowledge on a specific sustainability topic, that it is possible to communicate serious topics with humor, that tools and exercises are helpful for developing gags, and that effective humor also requires a good performance.
(7)	Creativity: Five students described positive impacts on their creativity, which continuously increased throughout the course due to them feeling empowered. Students considered it important that they were given space to be creative, for example, by ensuring openness in brainstorming sessions. They also indicated that the tools and humor techniques applied, such as analogies and exaggerations, helped them in their creative process.

As a third step, we asked the students to reflect on if, and in what way, humor had helped them in relation to sustainable development. Beyond the general impacts of humor shown above, we identified three more types of statements:

(8)	Humor helps students to communicate with people. Seventeen students noted how they often perceive sustainability issues as complex and difficult to convey. Deadlocked opinions arise quite frequently, and unsustainable behavior causes people to feel guilty, which results in defense mechanisms. Humor helped our students to boil issues down to their essence and to encourage their peers to re-think their behaviors and attitudes without being perceived as a know-it-all. Exaggerations helped students show the deficiencies and consequences of unsustainable behavior without blaming others. They especially considered the tension between consternation and laughing as helpful in encouraging others to reflect on complex topics.
(9)	Humor helped students to think critically about sustainable development topics. Seven students mentioned that developing their story and punchlines encouraged them to critically analyze the assumptions and underlying interrelations of sustainability problems, which contributed to a deeper understanding of the content and helped them to better remember it. Students also stated that the course made them think about the impact of their behavior on sustainable development.
(10)	Humor helped students better cope with their feelings of dismay, hopelessness, and powerlessness. Four students explained that humor helped them talk and think about emotionally challenging topics like climate change, biodiversity loss, and the violation of human rights. As one student stated, ‘If you don’t laugh about it, you actually would have to cry over it’.

Discussion

The purpose of this paper was to show if and how humor can be applied as a distinct learning method and what outcomes and effects can be achieved. Our approach adds a novel perspective to education research:

• Humor can be applied as a learning method in a higher education context to deal with serious topics. Our experiences and findings show that students can become active producers of high-quality humor on sustainability issues through a targeted combination of a scientifically sound discussion of serious topics and a playful atmosphere. The topics students chose to focus on show that a broad spectrum of serious and scientific topics can be addressed.

• Being funny cannot simply be demanded as a task, but must be supported in a targeted manner. We used approaches and tools from comedy writing (e.g. Toplyn 2014; Shatz and Helitzer 2016; McGraw and Joel 2014) and adapted them for our teaching through the development of a coherent course design.⁵ Using three distinct key components, we were able to support students in taking an active role in developing humorous content. First, teaching the basics of humor helped students understand that humor is not a talent or a gift, but rather a craft that follows clearly identifiable mechanisms and can be learned through practice (Markowitz 1994; Shiner 2012; Ługowska 2014). The collection of examples and exercises that we continue to enhance and improve provided students with solid insights into storytelling, the different types of punchlines, and the creativity techniques needed to develop them. It is important that the students do not gather existing gags and memes from the internet, but rather they develop new punchlines themselves to stimulate creativity and critical thinking, which are essential for sustainability education (see Sandri 2013; UNESCO 2014). Second, empowerment is key and relates not only to skill development but also to students’ self-confidence. It requires a playful approach by both the students and the course instructors, openness towards creative and open-ended processes, experience with methods of gag writing, and a highly encouraging attitude towards so that students will engage in this unusual teaching method. The resulting self-confidence enables students to become communicators and even ‘change agents’ which is a central aspect of sustainability education (Rowe 2007; Wiek, Withycombe, and Redman 2011; McArthur and Sachs 2009). Third, guidance towards high-quality results played a different role in our approach than the academic assessment of solutions and performance compared to other learning methods (e.g. case studies) because in our course design students deliver creative results (i.e. comedy scripts). These results are not as diverse as when art is used in environmental education (see Fragkoulis 2018; Papavasileiou et al. 2020; Staples et al. 2019), nor are they as focused as applying problem-solving processes in the classroom (see Ortiz and Huber-Heim 2017). We therefore do not grade the ‘fun factor’ of punchlines but their thematic soundness as well as their frequency.

• Humor as a learning method has statistically significant effects on students’ sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behaviors. The qualitative analysis also revealed the potential that humor as a learning method offers environmental education. Table 2 summarizes our findings and relates them to the merits of using humor as a teaching method (Hoad, Deed, and Lugg 2013; Miller et al. 2017; Strick et al. 2010).

Table 2 . A broader perspective on humor in education.

Humor as a teaching method	Humor as a learning method
Stimulates curiosity Contributes to a better student-educator relationship Improves the learning atmosphere in the classroom Enhances learning outcomes	Facilitates openness and contributes to creativity Empowers students to communicate with their peers Contributes to better coping with feelings of dismay Encourages critical thinking

A number of past studies have indicated the risks of using humor in the context of serious topics (e.g. Boykoff and Osnes 2019; Carter and Wiles 2016; Kaltenbacher and Drews 2020). If humor is used as a learning method in the context of a consistent course concept, we consider the following risks mentioned in the literature to be low in this context. First, the risk of trivializing a critically important issue is not particularly high as our approach places special emphasis on the quality of the punch lines by providing students with input literature, guidance, and multiple feedback rounds. As a result, any trivializations can be questioned and critically discussed in terms of their communicative function. Second, a potential reduction of the perception of urgency of action through humor would likely occur if the wrong target is chosen (e.g. if the effects of climate change are downplayed through humor). This risk would also be present if humor is used to ridicule a desired behavior or change (e.g. by joking about an environmentally conscious diet). These risks can be avoided by understanding the basics of humor and keeping the message in mind when developing comedy scripts. Third, the risk of negative feelings or misunderstandings when using irony or sarcasm is, in our experience, strongly influenced by the audience and if students share the same cultural background, which was the case here. Extensive feedback during multiple rehearsals can also reduce this risk. Fourth, the potential distraction from important content is, in our view, certainly present when using humor as a teaching method. However, this risk is significantly lower when humor is applied as a learning method, as the creative development of new punch lines requires and encourages a high level of content knowledge on the part of the students. Fifth, the potential risk that humor might not have any effect on action could not be confirmed by our empirical data, as we found positive effects on sustainability knowingness, attitudes, and behavior. We cannot provide empirical findings on the other potential risks, but will explore these in planned future research.

Conclusions

Research contributions

This paper offers environmental education researchers with multiple insights. It shows that humor offers more than an anchoring of positive emotions or improving the relationship between student and educator. As a learning method, humor can strengthen students’ critical thinking and creativity, help them to better cope with fears and anxiety, and enable them to become advocates for sustainable development in their peer networks. As these effects have not been sufficiently addressed in environmental education research thus far, we currently lack established scales and questionnaires to measure these effects, however. Our qualitative results offer initial insights into the diverse effects of humor and may stimulate the development of such measurement tools.

For education research more generally, we consider there to be a high potential for using humor as a learning method. We believe that our method is highly transferable since we have covered a broad variety of topics in our courses. We see a particularly high potential for this learning method when skills, group dynamics, creativity, and emotions are key aspects of a course or program. This method could be particularly suitable for topics with a high degree of complexity and ambiguity that require innovative and creative approaches while in contexts where these aspects do not play a role (e.g. conveying basic knowledge in law and natural science), there may be less potential for significant impact. Research on how this approach approach could be applied in other disciplines would provide a larger empirical basis for determining effects.

A limitation of the present study is that we were not able to compare a treatment group (with humor) with a control group (without humor). In our approach, humor is not an addition to conventional teaching but a learning method, making a comprehensive empirical analysis for such a comparison difficult to realize. In addition, the studied course is an elective, which involves a certain self-selection process when students register for the course. This probably resulted in a self-selection bias for students who are interested in humor and sustainable development and who may already have previous knowledge or special interest in these topics. Currently, we are planning an adapted version of our method in the context of a mandatory course, which would eliminate potential biases from students’ self-selection processes. Another limitation is that we only tested our method with master’s students who tend to be more skilled communicators than bachelor’s students; thus, we cannot determine the extent to which our method is appropriate at the bachelor’s level. We are currently testing and evaluating our method with bachelor’s students.

Implications for practitioners

Humor can provide educators with another tool in their experiential learning toolbox. We offer the following tips for educators who would also like to use humor in their courses could:

• Analyze late-night comedy shows as best practice cases with their students, identify, and discuss the different elements of humor (target, message, surprise), how storytelling and jokes are intertwined, and what techniques of humor are applied (e.g. exaggeration, analogies).

• Assign students to develop their own short scripts and punch lines on topics related to these best practices, through which additional facts can be introduced into the story and new punchlines can be developed, while retaining a clear focus on the best practices case.

• Invite improvisational theater actors or comedians into the classroom for a few hours to help students develop an open and creative mindset, lower their inhibitions, lose their fear of failure, and be encouraged in their spontaneity. In our experience, it is particularly important that the teachers also adopt this open and creative mindset and provide the students with appreciative and supportive feedback.

It is important to consider that our method is not based on a pre-defined solution but aims to arrive at novel insights through gags and punchlines. Therefore, the students did not find the right answers or solve a case, but instead developed something new. This high degree of creativity is precisely the reason why grading is difficult as there is no ex-ante catalogue of right and wrong answers. Thus, we perceive certain similarities to grading student assignments in art and design. In this regard, the further bridging of these communities could be fruitful. For the practice of comedy writing, the application of its tools and techniques in experiential learning increases the comedy-writing practitioners’ academic recognition and appreciation. Applying humor to topics such as sustainable development demonstrates the diversity of topics that can be covered by our learning method, far beyond acting and theater classes. Thus, our study substantially broadens the field of application of humor. To have comedy-writing teams and educators exchange experiences would therefore be beneficial for both sides.

For practitioners working on sustainable development issues in NGOs, in public policy, or in the business sector rather than in higher education like ours, we suggest that combining humor with serious topics may provide a new and unexpected view that contrasts with the constant feelings of guilt that some feel in response to sustainable development campaigns. In our experience, this contrast increases attention and public interest. For example, André Martinuzzi has been invited for several interviews on humor and sustainability, and the course concept won a best of Austria Education for Sustainable Development Award. Humor provides an opportunity to reach a broader public, raise awareness, disseminate knowledge, and eventually even change behavior. Using humor in sustainable development allows for change that is not motivated by guilt but on deeper insights into the absurdity of unsustainable behavior.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Markus Hennig for allowing us and our students to gain insights into the practices of comedy writing at ZDF Magazin Royale and Anita Zieher, Magda Leeb and Peter Graff for supporting our students with a broad variety of improvisational theater exercises. We greatly appreciate the valuable feedback of three anonymous reviewers and would like to thank our students for their great commitment, creativity, and courage to engaging with humor as an experiential learning method.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angelo Spörk

Angelo Spörk worked as a radio presenter, editor and program designer in Austria and Germany for more than five years. He is currently studying business law and specializes in experiential learning methods in higher education. At the Institute for Managing Sustainability, he is leading the communication of complex scientific knowledge and works as a video producer for European projects, such as www.living-innovation.net and www.re-sourcing.eu.

André Martinuzzi

André Martinuzzi is the founding director of the Institute for Managing Sustainability (www.sustainability.eu) and associate professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (www.wu.ac.at). He applied experiential learning methods in his courses since the mid 1990s, initiated the course ‘Humor and Sustainability’ and developed its core elements.

Florian Findler

Florian Findler was a postdoctoral researcher and project manager at the Institute for Managing Sustainability and currently works as Senior Associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers Germany. Together with André Martinuzzi, he implemented the course ‘Humor and Sustainability’ four times and empowered students to develop their own comedy scripts.

Heike Vogel-Pöschl

Heike Vogel-Pöschl was a PhD student at the Institute for Managing Sustainability and currently manages a research and development program at Adidas. She was involved in the qualitative data analysis of this paper.

Notes

1 The key components described in this section are not absolute rules defining what is funny, but serve as a basic and practical orientation how humor can be applied as a distinct learning method.

2 We deliberately refer to humor as a craft rather than an art reliant on talent or personality traits for several reasons. By calling humor a craft, we avoid causing students to feel overwhelmed or to complain that this type of course is only suitable for theater students. Doing so is in line with literature highlighting that craft is the result of learned ability, while art is highly dependent on talent. We encourage students to apply different techniques of gag writing in a similar way, as craft requires technique and practice, while art is often perceived as a non-reproducible product of the heart and soul. We apply humor with a specific purpose (e.g. to communicate sustainability-related insights), while art often centers the aesthetic character as an end in itself. In our case, humor serves as a vehicle for science-based messages, while art has an intended meaning but also endless interpretations that depend on the audience. For further details on humor as craft versus craft, see Markowitz (HYPERLINK "\\\\chenassoft\\SmartEdit\\WatchFolder\\XML_Signal_to_CCE_High_Speed_WF\\XML\\IN\\INPROCESS\\85" \o "42 = Ref Markowitz, Sally J. 1994. "1994), Shiner (HYPERLINK "\\\\chenassoft\\SmartEdit\\WatchFolder\\XML_Signal_to_CCE_High_Speed_WF\\XML\\IN\\INPROCESS\\85" \o "64 = Ref Shiner, Larry. 2012. "2012) and Ługowska (HYPERLINK "\\\\chenassoft\\SmartEdit\\WatchFolder\\XML_Signal_to_CCE_High_Speed_WF\\XML\\IN\\INPROCESS\\85" \o "39 = Ref Ługowska, Agnieszka. 2014. "2014).

3 We have intentionally decided to have students perform in the classroom and not in front of a large audience to create a safe space for the students that encourages shy people to get involved and that increases the likelihood that feedback from the instructors will be well received. We also put the emphasis on the quality of the storyline, the messages, and punchlines and less on gestures, mimics, intonation, or special skills of the respective performer. By doing so, we avoid the impression that our course is an acting class and that we would use personality traits such as extroversion as assessment criteria.

4 In Gericke et al. (HYPERLINK "\\\\chenassoft\\SmartEdit\\WatchFolder\\XML_Signal_to_CCE_High_Speed_WF\\XML\\IN\\INPROCESS\\85" \o "27 = Ref Gericke, Niklas, Jelle Boeve-de Pauw, Teresa Berglund, and Daniel Olsson. 2019. "2019), sustainability knowingness items refer, for example, to water consumption, biodiversity, human rights, poverty, and corporate social responsibility. Sustainability attitudes items refer, for example, to climate change, natural resources, and quality of life. Regarding sustainability behavior, the items included recycling, food waste, and purchase of secondhand goods.

5 Feedback from a leading comedy expert (Markus Hennig, the lead author of ZDF Magazin Royale, a very popular German late-night show) revealed that our course design has many similarities with the production of big late-night comedy shows, indicating that our method is a sound application of the practices of comedy writing in a learning context.