The Serious Business of Humor: Teaching Difficult Concepts Through Laughter

LinkedIn Article: August 25, 2025

When I first began teaching digital electronics to high school students, I braced myself for the furrowed brows and the inevitable, “Wait, what does this even mean?” Binary logic, flip-flops, and truth tables can feel abstract and intimidating, especially to students encountering them for the first time.

What I didn’t expect was that humor would become one of my greatest teaching tools.

Why Humor Matters in Hard Subjects

Humor lowers the stakes. When a student is laughing, they’re not paralyzed by the fear of failure—they’re open, curious, and willing to take intellectual risks. Cracking a joke about a circuit “shorting out on its Tinder date” or personifying logic gates as quirky personalities suddenly transforms rigid schematics into memorable stories. Students not only understand the material—they remember it.

Research backs this up: laughter strengthens memory pathways and reinforces emotional connection. But the results go beyond test scores. Years after graduation, former students still reach out to me—not just to tell me about their engineering internships or architecture careers, but to remind me of that one joke I told about resistors needing therapy for “bottling up too much resistance.”

They remember because humor tied the learning to an emotional experience.

The Teacher-Student Connection

When teachers use humor with care, it signals humanity: I see you, I get how tough this is, let’s face it together. That bond encourages students to engage more fully, to ask questions, and to persist through complexity. It builds a sense of trust that carries beyond the classroom.

Years later, students don’t always recall the exact equations of Ohm’s Law, but they remember the feeling: that learning could be joyful, that their teacher cared, and that even the most difficult material could come with a smile. It is exactly this connection that one of my former students wrote me last week:

"I hope you're doing well! Saw this the other day and thought of you. Just wanted to say hi before I go off to UCONN. Thanks for being the best PLTW teacher I ever had!"

Joy as a Lasting Legacy

Humor in teaching isn’t about being a stand-up comedian. It’s about creating joy-filled entry points into challenging material. It’s about reminding students that laughter and learning are not mutually exclusive—they are, in fact, partners.

In subjects like digital electronics, where abstraction can alienate, humor bridges the gap. It transforms difficult into doable, and doable into delightful. And long after the circuits are forgotten, the joy of the classroom endures.

Question for You:

How do you use humor—or joy—in your own teaching or professional mentoring?