Matt Lyle Bring Humor To Workshop

Writer, actor and director Matt Lyle’s workshop “Comedy Math: 2 + 2 = Banana” was a fun, informative and humorous workshop that had me and the class laughing really hard.

Lyle has produced a multitude of plays such as “Big Scary Animals” and “Hello Human Female,” his most notable being “Barbecue Apocalypse” which was nominated for an American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play award.

As students walked in, they were instructed to grab a pencil and a piece of paper for the exercises in class.

Once everyone was inside the classroom, Lyle asked the students to raise their hands if they had ever made their family or friends laugh. As a follow up question, he asked them why they thought it’s important to laugh.

Lyle then explained the science about laughing, how the release of endorphins make us laugh and how laughing lowers blood pressure, which I thought was very interesting information.

In addition to this, Lyle also stated that laughing is a social thing and how it helps us build connections with friends because of things like inside jokes.

Then Lyle asked if students had ever laughed at themselves and shared their funny moments with the class, which I thought was a nice ice breaker because students became a little bit vulnerable. 

Lyle stated that children between the ages of three to eight laugh 200 times a day, whereas adults laugh only 26 times a day. This difference was because children haven’t had as many experiences as adults and therefore laugh more. 

Next, Lyle wanted to know what types of things made the students laugh and what makes something funny. After students shared various answers, he asked if there were any things that people said that other students agreed made something funny. Things like an unexpected outcome and overall randomness were a common trend that people thought made something funny.

For their first exercise, Lyle instructed students to finish a joke. 

He explained that there were two parts to a joke: the set up and the punchline. The expectations are in the set up and then the punchline acts as a surprise.

Lyle wanted students to add a punchline to the phrase “My grandpa has the heart of a lion, and…” and share their answers with the class. This exercise allowed for a lot of creativity and hilarity ensued.

The final exercise was for the students to work in groups to create their own joke. The format of this joke would be to pick a situation, list four typical things to do in that situation, add an unexpected event and then repeat the second item with the new element. 

After students were done with that, they shared their answers with the class, which also led to an uproar of laughter.

In the end, this workshop was an enjoyable and hilarious experience. I liked how Lyle interacted with the students a lot and how everyone was laughing until the very end of the workshop.