Tuesday, December 05, 2023

The Best Jokes

(TESOL Materials--Jokes)
Google: slides, pub
[Explanation: Recently I was teaching a unit on Humor (Reflect Listening & Speaking 5--Unit 5) and to share some English jokes with my students, I returned to my old joke slideshows (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and I was immediately reminded of just how bad a lot of those jokes were.  Now, I don't blame myself for using bad jokes at the time.  When I created those slides originally, I had ongoing classes and my project was to give my students one new joke every lesson.  I didn't have a lot of resources to draw from, and some lessons I just couldn't find any good jokes, so I got desperate and just went with whatever I could find.  
But now that I've got a whole collection of them, it seemed like it would make sense to just combine my 3 slideshows into one slideshow, and edit out all the bad jokes.
And so, with all the bad jokes edited out, what's left is my collection of the best jokes for the ESL classroom.
"Best" in this sense doesn't necessarily mean "funniest".  Quite a few of these jokes are real groaners.  But these are (in my opinion) the jokes that work best in the ESL classroom because they are the ones that are most recognizable to the students as jokes.  The students either understand these jokes with no explanation, or they can get them with minimal explanation.  (Any jokes that required lengthy explanations got cut out.)  
Many of these jokes do have explanations after them (a legacy from the-earlier-slideshows they were imported from), but my preference now is to just skip the explanations, or if I do need to go through them, go through them as quickly as possible.  I think this joke slideshow works best if you keep it fast-paced.]

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