1 JUST ADD TECHNIQUES? `”Are you having a laugh?” Stand-up comedy and teaching in higher education in a `global age’. The word `global’ does not immediately summon up, as it once did, geographical images; actually, our Western images are completely opposed to the natural, primeval specificity of `geography’. Technology, especially email and the internet, dominate our understanding of the word `global’. We know that anybody, anywhere, with internet access, can receive information from Google, or Wikipedia on any subject in the world. Additionally, while much inventive and exciting work is being developed by teachers in HE (Web CT, pod casts, wikis, etc) there is a considerable danger that students will become increasingly passive consumers of `an education’, rather than active and engaged learners – excluded, rather than included. I have been an academic for twenty years; for ten of these years I have also worked as a stand-up comedian - this paper will establish several links between the two activities, and will suggest that teachers have much to learn from comedians about interacting with the people in front of them so that the experience is unique and unrepeatable. `Teachers need to keep a sense of play in teaching…teaching is an improviser’s art’ Kenneth J. Eble It is not uncommon to hear academics referring to teaching as a `performance’ – what is uncommon is to encounter any further analysis of what kind of performance it is. I think what most teachers mean, certainly younger, or newer, ones, when they refer to themselves as `performers’ is that they perceive themselves as actors, pretending to be2 more knowledgeable than they actually believe themselves to be. There are, no doubt, large numbers of academics who would empathise with this observation by the English stand-up comedian Alexi Sayle: `one of the comedian’s tricks is to pretend to be much more erudite than you are. Lenny Bruce used to do that all the time’ (Double 135). If academics are indeed `performers’ then the one branch of performance they are actually connected to most closely is stand-up comedy: only the teacher and the stand-up comedian rely on the continuous interaction between themselves and the people in front of them. Comedy clubs and seminar rooms always have this in common: they both fill up from the back. The difference between all other performers (dancers, actors, musicians…) and then teachers and comedians is that we require the people in front of us to also `perform’. For the seminar to work, to be considered a success, we need the students to contribute, to actually impose themselves and their views so that they help shape the dynamic and the direction of the seminar; just as good stand-up comedians will always interact with and respond to the particular audience in front of them. In this, we teachers and comedians are together all alone. No actor or dancer wants to see the audience declaiming their own soliloquies or performing their own pirouettes. Teachers are not actors; they are knowledgeable; one lesson they could take from stand-up comedians is to be less cautious. Elaine Showalter cites Camille Paglia on the relationship between stand-up comedy and university teaching: In her memoir of her Birmingham professor Milton Kessler, Paglia describes him as a master teacher: “With the improvisation of great Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce, Kessler would weave in and out of the class his own passing thoughts, reminiscences, disasters.” Paglia and Kessler are not the3 only teachers to mention stand-up comedy as a model. “The basic equipment for a classroom teacher is the same as for a stand-up comedian”, writes Lionel Basney (Calvin College); “a striking voice, a direct gaze, and the inner freedom to say more or less anything that comes to mind”’ (33). But what everybody neglects to observe here is the principal characteristic of stand-up comedians: their insistence on interacting with the people in front of them. When comperes in comedy clubs ask questions of the audience they are performing three tasks simultaneously: they are demonstrating their improvisational skills, they are providing the other comedians with information on the audience demographic, and, perhaps most importantly, the compere’s questions assume a proleptic role – they dramatise for the audience that stand-up comedy is, above all else, interactive; the audience is an integral part of the performance. One of the principal reasons comedy clubs are so popular (and it is worth noting that students are the single biggest audience for live comedy in Great Britain) is that the interaction with the audience that is fundamental to live comedy means the audience know the night is unique; unlike a film, or play, or recital, it can never be done in the same way again, even if all the performers were on the same bill on another night. I believe students value something similar in a seminar. Although I am a stand-up comedian, or perhaps because I am a stand-up comedian, I have no interest here today in the subject of comedy itself. I cannot better the advice to teachers given by Kenneth Eble: `Use humour if you can, but only if you can do it well’. (60) When we talk of “keeping students engaged” in higher education, we insist on seeing this engagement as always enthralling and enjoyable for the student. But engagement and even enjoyment are not always accompanied by smiles.4 It is a common mistake to assume that all stand-up comedians are only interested in getting a laugh, all the time. Many of the most highly respected acts on the contemporary British live comedy circuit are renowned for provoking audiences, for irritating them, for insulting them, for, basically, forcing them to think. The stand-up comedian and academic Oliver Double writes `Some of the best comedians don’t just use their tricks of sharing and rapport to get laughs and keep the lurking hostility at bay, they also use them to challenge some of the audience’s most basic assumptions’ (Double, 2005: 138). Similarly, if I have to provoke or irritate my students to get them to think for themselves, I am happy to do it. Performing stand-up comedy has influenced my teaching in three principal ways: Preparation, Performance and Curriculum Design. I want to talk principally about Preparation and Curriculum Design, mainly because the performance aspects are better suited to a workshop. I