Everyone should have the opportunity to work really hard at something while being able to enjoy that hard work. Over the course of my extremely short teaching career, I have already had this opportunity several times, but never more so than right now.

I just completed the first week of the summer class I’m teaching. We meet for three hours, four days a week, for three and a half weeks, so it’s pretty intensive, and a hell of a lot of work for both me and my students. Which is mostly a good thing: the name-learning and rapport-building and curriculum-shaping that usually takes me two or three weeks in a regular semester-long course was, for the most part, done by the end of class Tuesday.

Also, it’s a humor writing class— a subject very near and dear to my heart at least in the sense that, even if I can’t successfully be funny 100% of the time, I’d like to think I’m pretty good at sensing when something is funny and why. Granted, a lot of humor dissolves under closer examination, and I have my doubts about dissecting a David Cross rant in search of comedic techniques like bathos and non-sequiturs and Robert Benchley’s delusional dementia praecox narrator. But hey, they’re paying me pretty well. And they’re paying me to make my students read David Cross rants.

In fact, there are lot of things I can’t believe they’re paying me to do. Like debate the relative merits of fart jokes, play Patton Oswalt routines, make lists of hilarious profanity, photocopy Get Your War On strips, help students polish their stand-up routines, make occasional references to 30 Rock, the Simpsons, and Savage Love, and listen to my students convincingly delineate the twisted path from Jonathan Swift to Dorothy Parker to Sarah Silverman. Yesterday during a group critique I found myself writing “Swamp ass = Swass” on the chalkboard, and had to step back and pause just to appreciate such a sublime moment.

Finally, and most importantly, it’s now abundantly clear to me that I lucked out and got a really bright bunch of students. There are fourteen, which is the perfect number for a class like this, and they’re all wickedly smart. I’ve been consistently blessed in that regard.