by John Lane, Philosophy

Most academic papers are not very funny. I know because I’ve read them. The stereotype of academic writing is that it’s more akin to a bizarre linguistic purgatory that hates you and delights in your suffering than it is to a real intellectual discussion. The fact that it’s also unfunny doesn’t help.

There are several good reasons writers might choose not to put jokes in their research papers. Improperly executed, they can be unfunny, obnoxious, useless, irrelevant pace-killers. Since coming up with witty lines to use for a paper on applied Neo-Kantian metaphysics is a lot harder than it looks, most people just don’t bother. That said, I think completely abandoning humor in academic writing is a big mistake. So, I want to try to offer some pointers for how to use wit effectively because doing so can make your writing significantly more valuable to your readers.

Goals for Humor Writing

Tactical humor is an extremely versatile tool that can serve a handful of useful purposes if used well. By my estimation there are three closely related objectives that a potential quip is meant to accomplish:

• It breaks up tension or monotony
• It helps make your points more impactful
• It engages the readers and makes them actually want to continue reading (and not just because they have to for work)

These are all very good reasons to get better at including the occasional quip and the first step to integrating humor into your writing is to figure out which of these goals you want it to serve. Being able to answer why you’re including a joke is arguably the most important part of effective academic humor because it dictates everything about how you need to execute. “Because I wanted to” is not a good answer. Just because research papers aren’t the place to cudgel your readers into submission with cinderblocks of text doesn’t mean they’re the place to practice your open mic night material. As a rule of thumb, anything that doesn’t work towards one of those three goals should get cut. Be ruthless.

The first objective when you incorporate some witty flair into your writing is to use it to signal a chance of pace. This is useful when, as in our previous example, you’re writing about applied Neo-Kantian metaphysics, which contains some of the longest, dreariest prose available to the English language.¹ Boring through dense layers of highly technical argument is a grueling task for even the strongest minds. It pays to slow down once in a while to regroup and get a better sense of the argument at hand—not just because it’s less taxing on the reader, but also because it clues them into what’s important.

This brings up the second objective: making your points more impactful. A good way to conceptualize humor is that of switching from power drill to a scalpel. As a general rule of thumb, jokes aren’t meant to do the big conceptual lifting of your paper for you (i.e. the work of a power drill), since that suggests that what you have to say is pretty unserious. Where they shine, however, is helping you illuminate a specific point in a way that sticks in your readers’ heads (i.e. the work of a scalpel). Keep in mind that you need a nice balance of contrast in your writing if you want this to work. Not every sentence can be the big impactful climax. Overusing the scalpel is going to exhaust your audience the same way that laying into the power drill for too long (*ahem*) bores them. This is why it’s useful to have a good understanding of pacing, so you know when to pause and make an impact. As the saying goes, the secret to comedy is

Timing. Which brings us to the last and most important point: Make sure you are engaging your readers. The essential reason to use humor writing at all is that it draws your readers into your arguments and makes them want to engage with something that, for many of them, they would ordinarily have trouble engaging with. Remember that successful writing is about being altruistic and providing value to the reader. If your goal is to get published, you absolutely have to write for them and not just yourself. Plenty of journals occasionally publish incoherent, grammatically incorrect conspiratorial ramblings (How do you think Jacques Derrida had a career?). But you know what journals don’t publish? Stuff they believe is not worth their time.

People like to laugh, so why not give the people what they want? The reward is that they’ll be more interested in what you have to say and thus, more likely to give you a level of time investment that they wouldn’t give to someone else.

Some More Things to Consider

1. Make sure that the kind of humor you’re using fits the tone of your essay. If the tone of your essay is meant to be fairly conversational and straightforward (like this essay, more or less), then you can get away with more. If your tone for the entire essay has been fairly dry, maybe lay off the out-of-nowhere “that’s what she said” joke you had planned. Stick to a pun or some other wordplay. The stuffed shirts love puns. Or, to put it really simply, read the room.
2. You don’t have to be a laugh riot; you just have to be interesting. Nobody’s asking you to be the next Robin Williams. If you were, odds are you wouldn’t be writing about applied Neo-Kantian metaphysics. Your jokes are allowed to be corny or occasionally cliche. They are not allowed to be boring or trivial. Most audiences (in my experience) will forgive a lame pun, but will not forgive you for wasting their time.
3. When in doubt, wrap up it early. The peak of comedic writing is to always leave them wanting more.

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1. Which is sorta funny because, famously, the namesake philosopher Immanuel Kant is even more wretched to read in German than he is in English. Due to the German language’s grammatical war crime of allowing you to make a subject-designating verb the last word in a multi-clause sentence (e.g. “I hate lobster more than I hate oysters but less than I hate calamari,” versus the German version: “Lobsters more than I hate oysters, but less than I hate calamari, I hate.” Now add 5 more clauses and you have Kant.) it’s common practice for most contemporary German philosophers to read Kant in English. If you’re interested, here’s American humorist legend, Mark Twain to explain. ↩︎