Imagine I told you that “we have research showing that SINGING leads to more learning.” I suspect you would not feel surprised, but you would have a few follow up questions:
- Who is doing the singing? The teacher? The student? Someone else?
- What are they singing? Is the song about the content being learned? About Taylor Swift’s romance?
- Does the singing have to be good? Does harmony help? Are instruments needed?
And so forth.
You might have the same set of reactions if someone says to you “we have research showing that HUMOR helps in the classroom.” That’s good to know…but we’d like some details please.
As of today, I’ve got some for you.
The Details
Researching humor might sound like a humorless project. In this case, the research method isn’t funny, but it is helpfully straightforward.
A research team in Germany made five videos, about 17 minutes long, for a geography class. In each video, the teacher covered the same content: plastic waste in the sea. (Again, not a very funny subject.) Each video presented that content with a different style of teacher humor:
- Humor about the topic: using funny cartoons as part of the lesson
- Humor NOT about the topic: making jokes about everyday life
- Self-deprecating humor: stumbling, making fun of himself
- Student-deprecating humor (“aggressive humor”): laughing at a student’s hat
and, for sake of comparison,
- No humor.
To be clear, these videos werent comedy fests: there was about a minute of humor sprinkled throughout. Reseachers showed these videos both to 200+ teachers and 300+ students, and asked them to rate several qualities:
- Teacher quality (“The teacher is understanding of the students’ personal issues”)
- Interest (“The teacher poses interesting tasks”)
- Clarity (“The teacher explains the content comprehensibly”)
- Time on task (“A lot of time is being wasted in class”)
They also asked the 10ths grade students to rate
- Intrinsic interest (“I became inclined to delve deeper into the subject matter”)
- Student emotions (enjoyment, anger, anxiety, boredom)
So, the basic question is: did any of the different kinds of humor have an effect on any of those variables?
Data, and Beyond
We’ve got over 500 people rating 5 kinds of humor and evaluating 6 categories of response — so we’ve got A LOT of data. I’ll focus on the big findings, and try not to get lost in the niche-y details.
The simple headlines won’t surprise you: “On-Topic Humor: GOOD; Aggressive Humor: BAD.”
More specifically: on-topic humor got higher ratings for enhancing the teacher’s relationships with the students, and resulted in lessons being rated as more interesting. Students who saw the on-topic humor video rated themselves as more intrinsically motivated, and gave lower ratings to the negative emotions (anger, anxiety, boredom). All that sounds encouraging.
Aggressive humor — are you shocked? — interferes with teacher/student relationships, reduces intrinsic motivation, and ramps up anxiety and anger. I myself was a little surprised to read that it lowers the students’ rating of the lesson’s clarity, and gives students the sense that they spent less time on task (although they didn’t).
For comparison: on-topic humor had no effect, good or bad, on perception of time on task, or on clarity. (This final point is interesting. We might worry that on-topic humor would distract students and thereby reduce clarity. This study didn’t find that result.)
More broadly, the researchers found that off-topic humor and self-deprecating humor didn’t move the needle much (with a few exceptions here and there).
I’m Here All Week
Because “one study is just one study” (h/t, Prof. Dan Willingham), we should include important caveats here.
First: this study did not measure the effect of humor on LEARNING. Let me say that again. The researchers did not measure how much the students learned as a result of different kinds of humor. I think we can plausibly speculate that increased motivation and improved teacher/students relationships would result in more learning. But we don’t have data to support that claim, especially because…
Second: the researchers gathered self-reported ratings. The students said they felt more intrinsic motivation after the on-topic humor class. But would those self-reports — recorded by clicking a box on a computer screen — actually translate into genuine motivation? Or, stronger relationships with teachers? We just don’t know. The words “self-reported ratings” often earn the warning: “notoriously unreliable.”
Third: humor depends A LOT on cultural expectations. I don’t know much about the intersection of “Germany,” “humor,” and “school culture.” But I know enough to wonder how well that Venn diagram aligns with other Venn diagrams in other cultures and countries. We shouldn’t automatically assume that this set of conclusions applies in our cultural circumstances.
Finally: I’ll note that watching a 17-minute video of another classroom is not the same thing as learning from a teacher right here in the room with me every day. Videos are a good research tool, but results of video research might not always transfer to actual classrooms — especially for relational and motivational effects.
In Sum
I think I would have predicted that “on-topic humor” is modestly helpful in class, and that “aggressive humor” is definitely harmful in class. This study roughly supports those hunches.
If you’re a funny person, you can use this study as a guideline. Don’t mock your students; you knew that anyway. Don’t waste time with jokes about Saturday Night Live; they’re not having the effect you hope they do. But — if you want to — mix in some humor about the subject you’re teaching, you might well connect with your students a little bit more. And: that little bit helps.
Bieg, S., Banaruee, H., & Dresel, M. (2026). The impact of teacher humour on teaching quality and student learning: An experimental approach. Learning and Instruction, 102, 102311.
