Cover of The Wednesday Wars
Yesterday morning I picked up Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars to reread on my way to work, as my Kindle was charging so the PG Wodehouse I was in the middle of (Damsel in Distress) was temporarily unavailable. On page 80, seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Baker makes a joke and the protagonist, Holling Hoodhood, says,
That was a teacher joke. No one laughed, though we were all supposed to. No one ever laughs at teacher jokes.
So true, even when it comes to university-level teaching. My students will perhaps weakly smile at one of my jokes, but if I even attempt to use sarcasm or irony or anything like that on them, they just look at me. And although I don’t exactly feel like an awesome teacher when I make a point and they look at me all confused, it’s vastly preferable to those blank, slightly pitying looks.
At that point, I tend to go write something on the blackboard and tell myself it’s not me, it’s them and their underdeveloped sense of humor. Please don’t tell me otherwise.
There is an added difficulty when you make jokes in a foreign country: there are differences in humour between countries, even if they speak the same language. I remember that a Swiss writer explained that he had experienced that Germans listening to his talks would not laugh at his jokes, so he decided in the end that he had to give a serious presentation. – I also sometimes find that Dutch do not understand some of the jokes I try to make.
That’s certainly true.