Kevin, I still disagree. Humor can be taught. I know this as fact. There are degrees of success, of course, but that's how it is with any subject (if everyone was guaranteed 100% success in every subject they took, there would be no grades other than A's, no dropouts, no people who couldn't read, etc.).
The students who don't work at the course might not get much out of it. I can't tell, because there are always students who take the class but never once post in the discussion areas. They don't post assignments, they don't interact with the class, I don't hear a word from them. I can't guage their success. I can only discuss the ones who do post.
Some will start enthusiastically, but when things get a little difficult they quit posting. Are they unteachable, lazy, too busy, what? There's no way to choose just one answer as the only truth.
Others will work hard through the whole class. Those are the ones I know about because I can see the improvement from the first lesson to the last. Those are the success stories I know about.
I've had students who called themselves your equivalent of "unteachable" and in the first couple of assignments, I wondered if they were. By the end of the class, they were getting it. They were handing in assignments that were obviously humorous. To me, this was a clear indication of learning. Isn't that what teaching is? Teaching someone how to do things that results in them learning how to do them?
Why must this be about "buried abilities" as opposed to learning? There's no need to put humor on a pedastal. People play basketball all the time. Only a rare few make it to the NBA. There are people cracking jokes all the time, but only a rare few make it as stand-ups, professional humorists, comedy writers, etc.
We, as humorists, don't need a whole subclass of people who are humorless because they have no "buried abilities" to feel good about our own adeptness. Teaching people to find humor doesn't need to be explained away. It's like anything else. People can be taught art and music and writing and some will always be better than others. That's a given. But a little music in someone's life improves that life, just as adding a little humor does.
It can be taught. I've been doing it for years.
-- Joanna
