In our bathroom we have this book, “And here’s the kicker: Conversations with 21 top humor writers on their craft,” edited by Mike Sacks. It’s well suited for the throne, as you can dip in and read as little or as much as you want.
The gimmick is that you’d buy the book if you wanted to enter the comedy field. Which doesn’t seem very likely, but, then again, who reads books either? So maybe I’m one of the few people reading this one for entertainment value alone.
One of the interviews is with Woody Allen collaborator Marshall Brickman, coauthor of the 1970s classics Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan. Lots of interesting stuff in this interview, including this:
Marshall Brickman: [Woody] found a whole new area of insight: relationships of a certain kind, psychoanalysis, and the creation of the so-called loser—mostly with women. To some extent, the lower-with-women character was someone Bob Hope would play, but in a much more general and mainstream way. Woody’s character was more ethnically and culturally specific.
Mike Sacks: It takes true genius to develop a comic character like that.
Brickman: It does, but it also requires a collaboration with the audience. It’s the only way you can do it. You have to get out there and do a variety of material. Over times, certain things, statistically, will continue to work, and other things will drop away, and the audience will tell you what seems correct for you—for what you project onstage as a personality.
Sacks: But even with that said, you can work for twenty years and never connect with the audience half as much as Woody Allen.
Brickman: That’s right. That’s the genius. Creating something that somehow resonates with an audience that strongly.
If only Allen had died in 1986 (after releasing Hannah and Her Sisters) or maybe 1992 (after Husbands and Wives), just think how high his reputation would be. Even setting aside his personal life, releasing a series of flawed projects takes a toll. Not everyone’s a Scorsese or Spielberg who can keep it up into their old age. If Woody had gone in 1986, we’d still be speculating about the amazing work he didn’t have the opportunity to do.
But the thing that really interested me in the above-quoted interview is what Brickman said about collaboration with the audience.
This is true of teaching too! Teaching a class, even writing a book, is a collaboration with the audience. A book doesn’t read itself. With books, the challenge is that the audience doesn’t see it until it comes out. To continue the analogy, a live class is like stand-up; a book is like a movie.
When writing books, we always have the audience in my mind. The trouble is that the book might never reach the audience. That’s what I think has happened with Active Statistics. I’d like to rearrange it and rerelease it as a book called Statistics Stories. Or maybe, Important Concepts of Statistics in Story Form. Also I wish we’d given Regression and Other Stories the more serious and descriptive title, Applied Regression and Causal Inference. Maybe we can rerelease it under that title.
Anyway, yeah, “collaboration with the audience”: definitely.
I hate to say it, but you can see it with Trump, who clearly draws from stand-up in developing his political persona. He tries various stuff out at his rallies, some of it sticks unexpectedly (“I like people who weren’t captured”). He’s out there searching for resonance, and has a decent sense of when he has found it.
Dmitri:
In his reception as a speaker, Trump, like me, benefits from low expectations. Compared to professional actors or stand-up comedians, politicians and academics give boring speeches. Barack Obama is an inspiring orator, and Donald Trump gets off some good lines, but part of it is that these stand out against a background of boring political speeches, either boring uplift of the mom-and-apple pie variety, or boring partisan fury. Similarly, academic talks are typically pretty dull—you have to really pay attention to avoid missing the key points—so I get credit for lively presentations by comparison.
One of my colleagues, Gov’t researcher not academic, had a rubber brick to throw at the audience at a certain place in the talk.
I think this is quite prevalent in academia. Good teaching evaluations tend to go along with classroom theatrics. Dull lecture styles are rarely appreciated. Of course, we shouldn’t want to promote dull classes and entertainment can facilitate learning. But if we take politics as a guide, then this can easily go too far. Trump is certainly entertaining – and that seems to swamp his prolific lies and dehumanizing behavior in (too) many people’s eyes. Moderate politicians usually tend to be dull – because they don’t express extreme views. In politics this certainly seems to produce dysfunctional public policy (at least think so).
Is the same true in academia? We want classes to be interesting, not dull. But when style replaces substance, I think dysfunction occurs. I think this has happened with “lectures” and part of the reason why project-based learning, flipped classrooms, and other forms of active learning seem to be more effective than lecturing. Where does that leave asynchronous online learning? Nowhere, I hope (I don’t say the same thing about synchronous online).
Absolutely!! There is a great deal of humor in statistics such as a sentence I used to say at the start of the semester, “I am 100% wrong about everything including what I just said.” My best, and maybe only compliment from teaching stat was from a young lady who at the end of the semester told me “This class was interesting and informative even though I did not understand any of it”.
I once read the autobiography of a film editor who worked with Allen on his earlier films (“When the Shooting Stops… the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story”), and the “learn from the audience” thing appeared there as well. Apparently Allen would often revise and reshoot heavily after test screenings, with Annie Hall (IIRC) originally being a much looser gag-heavy film of the sort he had made previously (bananas, sleeper etc) but it didnt work. The audience seemed to come alive every time the Annie Hall relationship came on screen, so he essentially redid the movie around that.
“The trouble is that the book might never reach the audience.”
While I had BDA2 as a hard-copy at some point, insofar as academic monographs and textbooks go, maybe OA has also something to do with it? Of course, with OA, it is the same ridiculous story; you basically have to apply for a grant to get your work published (unless you self-publish, which is a different story).
As for Dale’s take on:
“Good teaching evaluations tend to go along with classroom theatrics.”
The easiest way to get good evaluations is to lower the bar and give everyone good grades, which is obviously detrimental for the both enterprise, including universities, students, and employers alike. Sad but true.
I take slight issue with this. I agree it is easy to improve evaluations by grading easier, but I also think students don’t particularly appreciate easy grading and dull courses. As skeptical as I am, I have seen students max out their evaluations for professors who are blazingly dull – even if they give good grades. To get stellar ratings seems to require entertainment value. Good entertainment value + tough grading = bimodal distributions in the evaluations in my experience (which lowers the mean rating, since those distributions tend to be quite skewed: it doesn’t take many bad evaluations to make the mean lower than comparable classes – I think there is some non-response bias at work there as well).
Could be, sure. I wonder whether anyone has studied the topic?
Having said that, student evaluations are evil and the “students as customers” mindset has caused a havoc throughout the world. (And, if you walk the ladder downward, the “parents as customers for their children” mindset.)
Actually, to reply to myself, there are plenty of studies, it seems.
“Are Student Ratings More Biased Than in the Past?
Yes. Research published in the past decade confirms and adds to Cashin’s short list of biases. The newest contaminants include well over a dozen variables extraneous to learning and largely beyond faculty control: instructor’s charisma (Shevlin, Banyard, Davies, & Griffiths, 2000), physical attractiveness (Hamermesh & Parker, 2005), personality (congeniality, confidence, optimism, and enthusiasm, estimated by studies cited in Clayson, 2011, to explain 50 to 75 percent of the variance in student ratings), age (McPherson & Jewell, 2007; Zabaleta, 2007), rank (Isley & Singh, 2007; McPherson & Jewell, 2007), gender in the sciences and engineering (Potvin, Harazi, Tai, & Sadler, 2009; Superson, 1999); membership in a disadvantaged racial group (McPherson & Jewell, 2007) and Asian accent (Gravois, 2005); the length of class meeting, in that longer meetings lower ratings (Isley & Singh, 2007; McPherson & Jewell, 2007); the timing of the ratings, in that collecting the data shortly before tests and due dates of major assignments and after returning graded work depresses ratings (Hall & Fitzgerald, 1995); class size (McPherson & Jewell, 2007; Wines & Lau, 2006); the number of rows in the classroom (Wines & Lau, 2006); other aspects of the classroom, the quality of the curriculum, and the functionality of the room’s technology (Nowell, Gale, & Handley, 2010); and the students’ perceived or anticipated grade in the course (Clayson, Frost, & Sheffet, 2006; Isley & Singh, 2007; McPherson & Jewell, 2007; Wines & Lau, 2006; Zabaleta, 2007).”
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tia/17063888.0031.018/–14-time-to-raise-questions-about-student-ratings?rgn=main;view=fulltext
While I won’t go and read the actual papers, it all kind of fits well into this blog. A good read also otherwise.