This paper presents the content of a critical thinking and writing course, along with similar courses derived from it, designed around the topic of humor and culminating in a microethnographic investigation of humor in students’ lives. The aims of the paper are threefold: to offer a general rationale for using humor in the writing classroom; to illustrate different types of potentials and dangers of such an approach; and to suggest extensions of the findings to the second-language writing classroom. The paper offers texts, writing prompts, and activities for instructors teaching classes that focus on the writing process in a first or second language.

Schmidt-Hidding’s (b. 1903, d. 1967) lexical field study on the area of Humor und Witz [humor and wit/jokes] (1963b) receives attention in humor research to this day, especially in German-speaking countries. His diamond-shaped illustration of the two dimensions of the field of humor, not least in its aim to distinguish “earthy” German from “courteous” English humor, has become well-known. In view of this continued interest in the final write-up of Schmidt-Hidding’s work on humor (1963a, 1963b), in which he consistently ignores his earlier related publications under the name of Schmidt, this paper aims to discourage researchers from basing their work on it for two reasons. The more important one is the flawed, or at least muddled and definitely outdated, methodology of his study. The more delicate one that is focused on here is that the motivation for and the ideological direction of the study are strongly influenced by its author’s National Socialist ideology, which Schmidt-Hidding had possibly assumed for opportunistic reasons and abandoned after World War II. I will first document this ideological alignment with National Socialism from Schmidt’s earlier work, basically a prelude to his Schlüsselwörter (1963a). Then I’ll briefly present the methodological flaws, to the degree that Schmidt-Hidding was sufficiently explicit about his method to make that possible. This approach of interpreting a complex issue in its historical and social contexts, along with showing what the issue is in contrast to analogous issues, is the important research agenda that Davies brought to humor research.

Article Deutsche Sprachkomik. Ein Überblick für Übersetzer und Germanisten [German verbal humor. An overview for translators and German philologists] was published on October 1, 2020 in the journal HUMOR (volume 33, issue 4).