Make Me Laugh, Mr. Sub

The other day I was standing at the till in the local Staples store, and as the clerk rang through my purchase he kind of grinned and said: "Hey Mr. Harris. Got a joke for me today?"

I only vaguely recognized him from a class I subbed a couple of months ago. I told him I couldn't tell him any jokes, what with me being off duty, and out of uniform, and all. We laughed.

This has been happening to me a fair bit these days-- unidentified teenagers accosting me randomly for a joke. Once I was waiting in line for a movie and the guy behind me suddenly said: "Hey, it's that Sub! Hey, Mr. Sub, make me laugh." Another time at the grocery store the cashier said: "Didn't you sub out at Riverview High once?" After we established that I'd taught her English class some five months ago, she said: "Yeah, you told us a crazy story about a pig."

I also told them how to correct dangling participles, or some such thing, but she remembered the pig joke.

As a sub, joke-telling was like the bat-a-rang on my utility belt. Taking that old proverb, "Only great folly shouts for silence" to heart, I usually started my classes by telling some corny story to get everyone's attention, rather than contributing to the chaos by trying to shout them all down. And usually before I was half way through, the class was listening rapt.

In two years of subbing, I developed a whole repertoire of goofy stories and off the wall lines that could get me through just about any roll-call unscathed, and establish the kind of credibility with teens that you can only earn by making them laugh.

In the process I learned all over again how important laughter is in forming community. Something about the shared emotional experience of a healthy laugh together: it fosters trust, and disarms confrontation, and encourages intimacy. Of course, humour can also do a lot of perverse damage. It can shatter trust, and intensify confrontation, and betray intimacy. C. S. Lewis said that the greater capacity something has for good, the greater the harm it can do when it is perverted to the bad. He used sex as his prime example of this, but we could say similar things about humour. The fact that it does so much damage when it's misused is a sign of how much good it's capable of if used wisely.

Once in a while subbing, I got to witness the good of humour.

For example: I'd been teaching a grade 12 English class a couple of days in a row, and as I reached for the attendance roster on day four, one of the students interrupted: "Just a second Mr. H." Then he plunked a digital audio recorder on the desk right in front of me. It seems one of his classmates had left for an early spring break to Hawaii. He was fine to miss the rest of the week studying the history of Canadian Lit, but he didn't want to miss the joke of the day. They were going to email it to him that night.

Among the many things I'll miss about being a sub, I'll miss those unique chances to laugh. And for the record, here's the pig joke: