Keynotes, podcasts, and public conversations on literacy, humor, comics, and justice.

“To teach genius, so to speak, also means we need to critically address that which restricts imagination, creativity, and critique, including our measures of ‘intelligence.’ For example, what if we read humor as involving intelligence instead of, as it is too often read, as unseriousness? In Tucson, Arizona, an English teacher, David Low, did just that.

Low recounted how his class, which was required to take yet another test ‘predicting’ how well they would do, expressed their opposition: ‘In the test’s margins, they doodled, wrote tiny editorials to the testing administrators and tried to force a dialogue.’ What some might see as students goofing off, Low understood as students’ investment in their education by providing, through humor, critiques of the curriculum: ‘Taken as a whole, many of my students used humor as a deliberate act of critical thinking, imagination and social consciousness, which were exactly the qualities the predictive test was not evaluating.’

While the predictive tests were eventually discontinued, Low’s students took a risk in talking back through humor. Indeed, he noted, ‘teens are often branded as troublemakers and effectively criminalized.’ In this case, viral justice also required educators and school administrators to expand their imaginations. As Low concluded, ‘I say that humor is a radical means for reading and deconstructing the world and for writing a better, more equitable one.’”

Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice (2022), pp. 136–137.