Playful humor in youth superhero storytelling

Humor, which is often surprising and digressive, is rarely considered an essential part of narrative storytelling in school. However, in our experience telling superhero stories with youth, we found that youths’ collaborative composing was an iterative and digressive process that was often interpreted by humorous asides, tangential parodies, and hyperbolic suggestions. In this article, we consider findings from 6 superhero storytelling projects, to demonstrate how the funny elements from youths’ superhero stories (material that is often ignored in both classrooms and research) in fact constituted serious creative and critical work.