Course examines what makes us laugh—and lie

Jason Riggle, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, begins each class of the “Language of Deception and Humor” by asking five random students to tell a joke. This dynamic introduction sets up a rigorous exploration of the language of everyday life. Appealing both to students who dabble in linguistics and those who are deep in the major, the course draws a connection between two seemingly unrelated topics—humor and deception—to create an interdisciplinary examination of linguistic concepts in comedy, politics, apologies and lies.

Riggle was analyzing the process of telling a joke one day when he came up with the idea for this distinctly UChicago course.

“Something clicked when I was thinking about the way you lead someone down a garden path when you tell a joke, and the way that they participate in the deception,” said Riggle, who has been teaching the course for 5 years. “People suspend disbelief to allow themselves to be deceived in order to get the joke.”

After further research into the subject, he found that both deception and humor are “fundamentally cooperative and social enterprises.”

The objective of the course is to use linguistic theory to analyze deception and humor in everything from advertising to politics, across mediums from memes to Youtube videos. Riggle views the class as an interdisciplinary look at an interwoven set of topics including persuasion, psycholinguistics and rhetoric, and instead of focusing on traditional technical skills often taught in linguistics courses, he teaches students how to analyze these topics in everyday speech like apologies and lies.

Assignments often require students to reflect on and analyze their own lives; homework ranged from keeping a lie journal with all the lies each student told in twenty-fours to researching conspiracy theories. The class tackles questions ranging from why some people find horror funny while others find it scary to why we believe conspiracy theories.

Sabrina Sternberg, a third-year who is majoring in both linguistics and cinema and media studies, believes the assignments have helped her analyze herself. “I learned a lot about how I consume media and how I interact with other people,” she said. “You get the skills to mindfully and actively analyze the way you lie to your friends, the way they lie to you and how there is deception in everything.”

Fourth-year Ellie Frank, who is studying English, commented that the class exposed her to how common lies are.  “I was really intrigued when we were talking about chain messages” because they represented the “virality of information, especially the virality of lies and deceit.”

When the course ends, Riggle finds that many of his students share an intriguing takeaway.

“The class made them realize how suspicious they should be of their own motivations and their own knowledge,” he said. “Because the thing that comes up over and over again is that you lie to yourself all the time.”

Midterm and final projects have only one requirement, allowing student creativity to flourish. Students must conduct some form of original research—previous projects ranged from stand-up routines to video analyses on race in comedy.

Riggle enjoys teaching the class because he continues to find subtle nuances that connect the two topics.

“There’s always some new threads at the edge that I’m picking at that tie everything together slightly better,” he said. “As soon as I finish figuring out all the little pieces, I’ll teach a new course, but that could probably take a decade at this point.”