How do we communicate with people who seem different from us? Can humor be a tool for connecting with folks across the aisle? Or is comedy usually a way to mock those who don’t agree with us? In this course, we will explore what it means to communicate, where the barriers to connection lie, and how those might be overcome. This will be a journey of expanded self-awareness, reexamination of perspectives, and engagement with viewpoints that are sharply opposed to our own. Then, we will transfer the learning from this process to the field of comedy. We will explore the nature of comedy — how it works, what tools it uses to raise a laugh, and how it shapes our ideas and worldview. Using contemporary comic forms, we will consider how the business of making people laugh and our own instinct to let out a guffaw at a joke have social, emotional, political, and ethical dimensions. Do we have a right to “freedom of laughter” like the freedom of speech? Or should there be some limits to the jokes we make. These are some of the questions we will explore in this course about constructive communication across difference in everyday life and in comedy.