Intermediate Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Comedy and Creative Nonfiction

ENGLISH CMCO Subject & Catalog Number

Description

In this workshop-based class, students will be asked to use humor as the bedrock of their creative nonfiction writing. Humor connects us as human beings and creates and sustains attention and trust from our readers. You will write three nonfiction essays in this class, and the topics that you touch on may well be dark or difficult; this is up to you. Humor is often a means to navigating, inverting, and confronting our sadder and most challenging life stories. As I see it, making people laugh is an intellectual exercise in empathy as much as it is an exercise in healing and happiness. We will read essays by Samantha Irby, Rafael Agustin, Jia Tolentino, Roxanne Gay, David Sedaris, Amy Roach, Trevor Noah, Hua Hsu, Terry Galloway, among others. We will also view performances by Nathan Fielder, Sabrina Wu, Beth Stelling, Asha Ward, Zainab Johnson, among others. For stand-up comedians of any level enrolled in this class, you will have the option of writing and performing a standup set.