Seriously funny: Humor in adolescents’ critical media composition practices

This article examines humor as a consequential genre in adolescents’ multimodal composing. Drawing on illustrative examples from a rural youth media arts camp, it traces how humorous parody films reorganized revision, genre attention, and audience awareness. Youth treated laughter, silence, and embodied response as data for revision, engaged in fine-grained adjustments to timing, sound, and visual design, and learned to perform faux gravitas as a genre-aligned craft move. Framed through vitality rights and genre-as-social-action, the article argues that humor is not a detour from rigorous writing instruction but a powerful site for cultivating purpose, craft, and humanizing composing practices.