Humour: barely acknowledged by Youth Work

‘Philosophers of education need to stop neglecting discussions about humour and, instead, embrace its potential in education’

Finding the missing link

Anyone who knows me knows of my love for humour and the value I place on it, not only within the youth work setting but also with the practitioner. Anyone who knows me will also know of my frustration with the complete lack of acknowledgement of the power of humour by the Youth Work profession itself.

Let me give you an example - go to YouTube and type in ‘Humour in Youth Work’ and the first thing that comes up is ‘Ronald Reagan’s One-liner’s’. Yes, I kid you not! Next up is ‘Terrible Social Worker’ followed by ‘The best dry humour kid magician.’ Incidentally, ‘Christian comedy stand up - Clean Christian humor’ is right up there in 5th place. Now, given the amount of uploads to the Internet in any one day the result you get if you try it might alter but my hunch is not overly. Arguably if there were resources or materials onthe link between humour and youth work you'd likely find them on YouTube, right?

Anyhow, I digress. I varied my search thinking that there must be something on YouTube relating to humour and youth work so I tried, ‘using humour to work with young people’. Interestingly enough, our very own Training Programme, ‘Humour is Serious Business’ comes up followed by ‘Leonard Bernstein: Young People's Concerts - Humor in Music (Part 1 of 4)’ before ‘ Millennials in the Workplace Training Video’ and ‘Fed Up - police stop and search’ complete the top four. Yes, quite a diverse combination.

Not satisfied with this, I modified my search again. I entered ‘humour and non-formal education’ and the search produced countless references to non-formal education and little or nothing on humour.

Therefore, what conclusion can I draw from this little experiment? Well effectively (apart from our own Training Programme) there is next to nothing on YouTube about Humour and Youth Work which, given the variety of content on YouTube, comes as a bit of a surprise.

I turned my attention to Google. I typed in (exactly) the same headings, and it has to be said enjoyed a little more success – not surprising mind you, it is Google after all. This time I found references to a variety of humour-related themes, e.g., roles, benefits, effects, etc, but not a lot about humour’s relationship with youth work or vice versa.

Humour – part of a staple diet that’s most certainly not on the menu

What is notable from my search on google is the range of links that emphasise that youth workers should possess a good sense of humour. Whether a job description, guidance manual, codes of practice and so on, the theme is repeated time and time again.

The National Youth Agency for example, states that effective youth workers need three things: good listening skills, a good sense of humour and eternal patience whilst Groundwork recommends practitioners ‘be very enthusiastic, passionate and [also] have a good sense of humour’. Youth Scotland highlight a sense of humour as one of the most desirable qualities a Youth Worker should possess whilst the Wellcome Foundation goes as far as to suggest that when working with youth workers, ‘humour goes a long way’, i.e., implying that if you want to engage with youth workers use humour because that is the language that speaks to us.

Working with young people is immensely rewarding but as most of us also know, it can be extremely challenging so having a good sense of humour is well understood. However, the obviousness of such a statement is only matched by the virtual anonymity of humour from the annals of youth work. It is virtually impossible to find any policy, historical record, journal or similar document on the subject and you’re just as unlikely to find any event, be that training programme, seminar, conferences or otherwise focusing on humour.

Aside from our own ‘Humour is Serious Business’ TC that my colleagues and I run and the recent ‘HumourMe’ project, which I refer to further on in this blog, it is immensely difficult to find anything that addresses the role of humour in youth work.

Now I should confess that I haven’t researched this as in-depth as I could but as someone who has been involved in youth work at local, regional, national and international level for over 30 years, I’m still awaiting the first policy/report/journal on humour in youth work. Please do not hesitate to contact me and correct me if you any document that demonstrates otherwise.

In a bid to further support my assertion, let me give you one solid example, a more contemporary one. The recently published (and very well received) Council of Europe ‘Thinking seriously about Youth Work And How To Do it’ document is 446 pages long. It contains 38 sections on a variety of topics and is the combined work of no less than 40 contributors. Forty contributors (many of them distinguished) yet humour is mentioned only once throughout the entire document, and that a mere fleeting reference! Even death gets a mention on four occasions, fashion six times and experts/expertise, wait for it, 72 times!

Now think about this for a moment – the title is ‘Thinking seriously about Youth Work And How To Do it’ and then consider this - If the most consistent and recommended quality a youth worker should possess is a sense of humour, why then, in a document that shows you ‘how to do it’, youth work that is, does humour merit only one mention?

The irony of all of this is that seven young people, clearly from very diverse backgrounds, all of whom are smiling and laughing, adorn the front cover! This of course conveys a very positive and powerful message and/or image – youth work is fun, young people are fun, both go hand in hand. Young people are playful, they enjoy themselves, and they have a laugh –together with youth work they are joined in the holy matrimony of humour!

There is of course no reason to doubt that a playful youth work goes hand in hand with fun-loving young people and humour is often the glue that binds them – there is no shortage of evidence available on the value, relevance and benefits of humour. Countless articles, studies and experiments conducted and written by a wide range of academics and researchers down through the decades, including esteemed individuals such as Dr Lee Berk demonstrate this vividly.

More importantly however, there are those within our wider field, not merely youth work but for example, social work, social care and health, that understand the importance of humour, e.g., Will Palmer, writes about how humour is used as a coping mechanism whilst Community Care describes how ‘laughter can help us through the most difficult of times’

When Google and YouTube just doesn’t cut it…and Infed is none the wiser!

There are of course those who would view, somewhat sceptically, YouTube and Google as a relevant source for finding relevant material and academic literature, so it was with this in mind that I turned to infed, which for anyone in youth work, certainly within the UK would acknowledge, is a very well respected source of academic reference and information.

I searched Humour and it brought up 32 results – Mentoring and Folk Dances strangely were among them. One-third of results referred to the same two people, i.e., Lesley Sewell (3 times) who was described as having a ‘lovely sense of humour’ and Mary Carpenter (8 times) who it was noted was known for ‘Her realism, tolerance, and good humour struck a particularly liberal note.’

Even on infed, there was few meaningful references to humour. Anything significant included Sue Robertson’s description of the best youth workers ‘as those who were friendly, approachable, [and, wait for it] had a sense of humour’, whilst Mark Smith, who highlights humour as a means of resistance to dominant ideologies, cited Giddens who in in a similar vein, describes humour as a means ‘to attack and to defend against the influence of outside forces.’

Smith and Rogers also emphasise the value of bringing a sense of humour (p32) to working with young people (in the outdoors) whilst John Digney, in his book The Therapeutic Applications of Humour, quotes Lee Berk (who writes)

‘….with laughter it’s as if the brain gets a workout. It allows for the subjective feeling states of being able to think more clearly and have more integrative thoughts. This is of great value to individuals who need or want to revisit, reorganise or rearrange various aspects of their lives or experiences, to make them feel whole or more focused.’

The benefits of humour are very well documented and it’s abundantly clear that youth workers not only need a sense of humour to work with young people but are expected to have one.

More questions than answers

That however continues to beg the question, why is humour not given more recognition (within youth work) as an effective means of engaging young people? Why does it not occupy youth work policy, appear in any curriculum, given more prominence within the training field or promoted by the NAs and SALTOs of this world?

Why is it that all the various art forms we love, e.g., music, dance, theatre, poetry and so on are given due recognition and held up as tools that youth workers can use yet humour fails to achieve any kind of notable recognition?

I have asked myself this question many times and have concluded that humour is so implicit and generic that it is simply not recognised or thought of as a tool that can be used in youth work - it is just there, no-one thinks about it, no-one really cares to think about it.

In my humble opinion, that is simply not good enough, and not to acknowledge humour as an effective and engaging tool to use with young people no longer holds merit. I say this because over the years I have detected a reluctance among practitioners and policy-makers to explore humour in youth work and a reticence to acknowledge, accept or even treat humour and its immense potential as a pro-active methodology to engage young people never mind the respect it merits. The irony I suspect is that no-one takes it seriously!

Humour, which has existed for millennia with a long and notable history, yet relatively recent concepts such as European citizenship and diversity, and/or competence areas such Digital Skills and Entrepreneurship are already embedded and prioritised within programmes such as Erasmus+.

Humour ticks all the right boxes

Humour has countless benefits as I have highlighted already but more specifically in many of the areas that we advocate, or that we work with young people in - be that health, the workplace, dealing with relationships, or in social interaction with others, humour has immense significance.

Not only that, and wait till yee hear, in an age when youth work is under greater than ever pressure from cutbacks, shrinking resources and competition from other agents to provide services to young people, humour is free, it’s natural, everyone has it, minimal resources are required and a little bit of imagination and creativity can service it indefinitely. It is arguably the most commonly requested characteristic in any role description yet it figures nowhere in the youth world vernacular. The role that humour plays and its significance in youth work practice can no longer be ignored!

Just as knowledge of neuroscience has increased in recent years so the cognitive role of humour takes on greater significance. Vrticka and Sambanis, ‘Humour – An Important Spice to teaching?’ reported that ‘many studies have identified the hippocampal region as taking on a central role during humour experiences.’ Dean Burnett in his book, The Idiot Brain, also tells us how

‘Many regions have been implicated in the processing of humour such as the mesolimbic reward pathway…..The hippocampus and amygdala are involved…[whilst] numerous frontal cortex regions play a role, as much humour comes from expectations and logic being disrupted, which engage our higher executive functions.’

Salvatore Attardo describes humour competence as ‘The capacity of a speaker to process semantically a given text and to locate a set of relationships among its components’ whilst Rod Martin writes that ‘Humour provides a way for individuals to shift perspective.’ Nagler and Ridd, underline the importance of humour as a time-honoured strategy in the repertoire of nonviolence.…[and] when used in the right spirit, does always work: it always puts quarrels into a larger context, and it humanizes the grimmest of situations.

Aju Basil James characterises humour as encouraging ‘doubt, chaos and relativism about the discourse it targets….[and] throws away the allegation that it is often incapable of constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.’ Mora, Weaver and Lindo highlight humour as ‘an important tool for conveying multiple forms of messages, ranging from simple casual observations about daily life to more serious social denouncements of political and social inequality.’

There are those who might suggest that humour is so broad, so diverse and so implicit that it’s not possible to pin down the various elements that can help frame it as a competence to support the personal and social development of young people. I would of course disagree with this. Where YouTube did come in useful was ‘turning up’ one very clear example where humour is framed as a tool for learning and in doing so further cements the case for recognition as a competence - check out this ‘Humour Unit’ from Richelle Hatton, which mirrors some of the accredited learning tools I have seen during my youth work career.

Humour – how it engages

When I have told people about our ‘Humour is Serious Business’ TC, one of the questions always posed is ‘so you teach people how to be funny?’ I always respond by telling them no - our intention is to show how by changing the dynamic of any situation you can create the conditions for humour and thus that is where the humour is created and ultimately learning comes from.

People still wonder though how humour works, i.e., the step-by-step process and so the diagram below is useful in addressing that question. Found in Digney’s book, The Therapeutic Applications of Humour it demonstrates the process involved in engaging young people. If there is any doubt about the role and in particular the power of humour it is surely minimised by this simple explanation.

Evidence of Need

I have spoke about the need for humour to be recognised in youth work and of course have been left wondering as to why it doesn’t make it on to the ‘youth work agenda’ as such. Apart from my own belief that it’s the fault of its largely implicit rather than explicit nature, the lack of identified need among youth workers/trainers might be another factor as well (although I’m sure not the only reasons but clearly are contributing factors). That said, the notion of such might just be about to be put to bed.

Findings from the recent Erasmus+-funded ‘HumourMe’ project, has produced evidence that certainly begins to make the case. A questionnaire circulated among non-formal educators/youth work practitioners found that practitioners overwhelmingly want to increase their humour competence so that they can use it in their training and youth work delivery.

Among the many findings two key points emerged:

• 93% of respondents (116 respondents, 61% of which were Youth Workers and/or trainers drawn from 16 different countries) wanted to improve their humour competence as a trainer very much (66%) or much (27%)

• Participants identified specific humour learning needs, i.e., using humour to deal with complicated situations (80.3%), reacting fast (64.8%), improvising (63.4%), delivering information in a fun way (59.2%), including humour in my session planning (52.1%), avoiding boredom (43.7%) and seeing the funny side of each situation (39.4%)

If evidence of need was ever the basis with which humour was viewed as less important than other youth work issues, be that intentionally or not, then perhaps the ‘HumourMe’ Project has set in motion a chain of events that might see Humour recognised in the same way that other art forms are.

These figures should not be viewed as comprehensive but nor should 116 respondents be looked upon as insignificant. There are 386 registered trainers on SALTO and if we assume all who completed the survey are involved in training then this would be akin to 31% of the training community.

Of course, I’m pretty certain that all of those who completed the survey are not registered on SALTO but then again there is no definitive picture of how many trainers are involved in this field. The numbers do offer not only an indication of the level of interest in this area but the level of desire to explore the area further.

Conclusion

The benefits of humour, as we have demonstrated, are not only wide-ranging but also (more than) well evidenced. Humour facilitates cognitive development, which in turn allows you to address many relevant issues in the lives of young people (an area I haven’t even touched upon in this blog). There now exists evidence that practitioners not only recognise the importance of humour in their work but have identified related needs thus making the case (as if it were needed) that Humour deserves its place on the Youth Work Agenda. As Gordon has argued ‘philosophers of education need to stop neglecting discussions about humour and, instead, embrace its potential in education.’ Nothing I could agree with more!