Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’m an associate professor at an elite university . . . yes, it sounds pompous when I write it but it’s also true . . . so, I am no stranger to the lecture . . . both in my current incarnation as high fallutin’ type lecture giverer and my former life as a student when dinosaurs walked the Earth and I was quite the lecture takerer . . . in fact I am a lecture masterer in my own mind . . . so, when I see clips like the following, I just have to ask, is this a new trend? The “interrupt serious large lecture in humorous fashion prank” . . .

. . . first . . . a student interrupts the professor by belting out a Broadway style song that obviously is metacritical of university education . . .

. . . . second . . . in an homage to what is now the bane of the lecture hall, the cellphone interruption . . . the professor lectures and the student takes the call then bursts out of the classroom because of an emergency, a special emergency in which he rips off his clothes to reveal his Superman costume . . .

Now, these appear to be genuine pranks, judging from the honest befuddled, confused, and confounded reactions of the lecturers and the students. They are also obviously premeditated as the cameras are setup with fellow students hidden in the hall.

The question becomes are they merely pranks or simple sophomoric gambits at raw humor – silliness as college boys will be college boys – or are they a clever new form of dialogue, of critical insight into fundamental issues related to the impersonal large lecture format or the passivity of modern education or other issues of contemporary university life?

Probably . . . a bit of all of that. However, they are funny. Well, I think they’re funny . . . especially, as they are happening to someone else’s lecture and not mine. Not sure how I would react, the professors in these clips take it good naturedly . . . I can imagine a coupld folks who would not be quite so easy going (the former colleague who publicly screamed at students causing nearly an entire class to burst into tears comes to mind).

BTW, grammar errors and language strangeness above are either intentional for fun given the subject of the post or just the way I write so clever hans types can keep the ol’ blue-pencil to themselves. The clips above all come from the funny folks at Break.