ABSTRACT
Humor is an essential element in social interactions. Some researchers posit humor as a part of a speaker’s communicative competence (Attardo, 2002; Gironzetti, 2013). In this chapter, I discuss humor both as a teaching tool and as a communicative strategy and make a case for its instruction in L2 Spanish. I also explore L2 Spanish teachers’ ideas about its role in the classroom using an online questionnaire on Survey Monkey. My results show that while most teachers see humor as a pragmatic strategy that needs to be taught and learned, many of them cannot teach this skill due to a lack of time or to the lack of knowledge on how to do it. Since there are no clear guidelines, a sample of activities and strategies to foster students’ understanding on the use of humor in L2 Spanish are included at the end of this chapter.
