Introduction

For the humor unit in English, we studied several notable writers and comedians who use humor to enhance their work and emphasize their commentary in a way that resonates with lots of people. As a class, we read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a novel that utilizes satire, absurdist humor, and dark humor to illustrate the author’s experience with war.

The Humor Project allowed us to create an original comedic work with the strategies we learned from professional humorists. I worked on a slideshow presentation with my group members Letitia and Quinn in which we gave an “informational” “talk” on a “nation” called “Lesseb” (#lesseblove). We performed using absurdity, incongruity, and dramatic irony, as we made up and referenced information about a nonexistent country to sell the validity of our presentation.

View the recording of our performance below:

Reflection

I’m really happy with how we did with our Humor Performance. I was glad that we were able to get the audience engaged with multiple parts of the presentation, like singing along to the Lesseb Love song and asking additional questions about the country. My group and I also got a couple chances to improv when giving responses to the Q&A segment, which made me laugh a lot when presenting and again while watching the footage at home. I think the fact I still found all of this funny days later is a pretty good sign!

Everyone in class was incredibly funny for playing along with the bit and asking us so many entertaining questions. I really appreciated how supportive the atmosphere in the room felt, even though what we were presenting was essentially complete nonsense.