Grackle art by Christy Stallop
Surprise is a powerful social response. It motivates us to engage with increasingly complex tasks and environments, and people elicit more surprise in the brain than any other stimuli. Perhaps most surprisingly, humor and poetry engage the cognitive sequence of surprise in very similar ways, which suggests that, to our brains, humor and poetry are both social engagements. In this generative workshop, we’ll explore examples of poetry, humor writing, performance art, and stand-up that inhabit this comedically surprising and surprisingly comedic intersection. We’ll practice wielding the rhetorical tools stand-ups use such as broken assumptions, exaggerations, self-depreciation, the rule of three, callbacks, contradictions, puns, and meta-statements. We’ll discuss the difference between laughter and humor, as well as frameworks for understanding humor like the Incongruity Theory, which can move poets and readers from laughter to awe.
Jennifer L. Knox is the author of five books of poetry in English, most recently Crushing It (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She is currently at work on MYCYOWA, a traveling public art installation dedicated to increasing awareness of mycoremediation, supported by the the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs and the NEA. She has taught poetry writing at Hunter College, New York University, Iowa State University, and in her own series of private online classes. She lives in central Iowa and is the proprietor of Saltlickers, a small spice blend company.