Professor Brings Jokes to Class

CHICAGO--Did you hear the one about the professor who considers humor serious business?

He gave a final exam Monday night in which students had to do a three-minute stand-up comedy routine in the back room at a pizza restaurant. Topics ranged from dead celebrities to sex to ethnic stereotypes to sex to television evangelists to sex.

John Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Chicago, says jokes are important corporate management tools and a necessity for effective leadership.

But to hear the 26 juniors, seniors and graduate students in Jones' "Humor in Communications" class, jokes are jokes--and the raunchier the better.

"They aren't preparing to be stand-up comics," Jones said. "But I think anyone who completes the class should be able to walk into a tense business meeting and break the ice."

Some of the students could probably break the ice at a meeting of Marine Corps drill instructors.

Jones defended occasional distastefulness of the routines, saying such jokes have their uses, even at funerals.

"I've made a two-year study of humor at funerals, and I've found that--contrary to the advice of every expert from Aristotle on down--that jokes have a role, even in eulogies.

"As a matter of fact, you almost can't miss with jokes in a eulogy, even when they're not in good taste. You have a very sympathetic audience."

The students also had a sympathetic audience--each other Jones said that as the 10-week class progressed, the students became less and less inhibited in their humor, particularly the women, who were 20 of the 26 students.

"I was so nervous about standing up before an audience that I broke out in hives," Estela Guerrero complained on stage. "So I went to a hypnotist and he put me under and made me direct my nervous energies elsewhere."

"It worked," she added, as she pulled tufts of hair off her head and out of her armpits.

"The routine counts for about 25 percent of their grade," Jones said, "but they also had to write papers on humor as a management tool, humor in leadership, understanding cross-cultural humor and the use of humor in managing conflict."

Current events cropped up in some of the routines.

"Did you know that [former television evangelist] Jim Bakker's problems really started when Tammy Faye took her makeup off and realized she was really Jimmy Hoffa?" asked Sheryl Underwood. She also told a largely unprintable tale about Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Gary Hart on a sinking cruise ship.

Student Kimberly Mestrom took the audience on a flight attendant-style tour of the elevators in a questionable high-rise building, pointing out the safety features and wryly noting their futility.

"In case of fire," she said, "oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling so you can scream into them for your last five seconds of life."