Humor Tips

Comedy writing and online teaching secrets

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Why Humor Is the Red Bull of Online Teaching

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep. —W. H. Auden A teacher’s job is to educate, not entertain. And it’s certainly not…

April 10, 2026

The Classroom Demands Lame Humor

In comedy, humor is binary. Something is funny—or it isn’t. In most higher education settings, students and instructors self-identify their gender. Humorists don’t have that…

April 9, 2026

Teaching in the TikTok Era

I have an AARP card, which means I’m officially banned from Snapchat, TikTok, and most other social media platforms. The one exception is Facebook, which…

April 4, 2026

Educational Tinder

“I will never forget my first day of school. My mom woke me up, got me dressed, made my bed, and fed me. Man, did…

April 2, 2026

Using Humor to Reduce Test Anxiety

Tests make students nervous. Even well-prepared students experience test anxiety, and anxiety is the enemy of learning. A tense brain struggles to retrieve information, while…

April 1, 2026

Let Students Help You Find the Funny

Designing, building, and teaching an online course is ungodly time-consuming. Asking instructors to also hunt for humorous material can feel like adding another task to…

March 29, 2026

When Humor Hurts Learning

I wrote a bestselling book on humor writing, Comedy Writing Secrets. I know how to target humor, write one-liners, and even perform stand-up comedy. Which…

March 29, 2026

The Safest Target in Classroom Humor

A classic comedy adage says: “If there’s no corpse, there’s usually no joke.” In other words, humor almost always attacks something—people, places, ideas, or institutions.…

March 12, 2026