“Interesting but incongruous”

The goal of this case study is to explore the attitudes of Greek secondary education teachers towards the teaching of humour within a critical literacy framework. This fieldwork-based research took place during and after 8 training seminars (218 participants), which aimed to familiarise educators with the critical teaching of humorous texts using an annotated database. After each seminar, participants answered questions eliciting their attitudes towards concepts and proposals introduced in the training sessions. This data (collected in two stages, immediately following the training and 15 months later) is complemented by fieldnotes from the discussions that took place during the training sessions. Our findings indicate a lack of familiarity with the theory, the sociopragmatic effects, and the teaching of humour. For many teachers, humour functions exclusively as a means of attracting students’ interest. Participants evaluate the critical teaching of humour as interesting and innovative, but simultaneously express various concerns regarding its applicability, which can be attributed not only to practical difficulties, but also to long-standing biases regarding the purposes and standards of language education.