I love being a college professor.
But I hate reading student papers.
Hate it.
Many students believe size matters. They assume Microsoft Word’s word-count feature can predict their grade.
More words = better grade.
Student embellishment can get so extreme that one of my colleagues grades fluff with rubber stamps labeled “BS.” The stamps even come in different sizes depending on the amount of padding.
If a paper contains pure, unfiltered embellishment, it earns the full stamp.
Undergraduates are amateurs when it comes to fluffing.
It takes four years of graduate school to master the craft of expanding a ten-word idea into a multi-paragraph, Ambien-inducing thesis.
If you don’t believe that skill exists, read a memo written by a college administrator.
In some forms of writing, embellishment may enrich the text. But humor works differently.
A joke is not a short story.
It’s a micro-story, often told in a single sentence and delivered in as few words as possible.
This principle matters even more in online teaching.
Students read announcements, discussion posts, and slides quickly—often on their phones. Long explanations bury humor before it has a chance to land.
Professional humorists understand this. They constantly rewrite jokes, removing unnecessary words, especially in the punchline.
Consider this classic line from Mitch Hedberg:
“I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.”
Nothing is wasted. Every word earns its place.
When instructors use humor in online courses, the same rule applies:
shorter is better.
A quick pun, one-liner, or short caption will land far better than a long humorous story buried inside a lecture slide.
In humor—and especially in online instruction—there’s often an inverse relationship between funny and word count.
There’s a time and place for fluff.
Just not when writing jokes.
A great joke may be BS…
…but it won’t contain BS.
And that’s no BS.
