Teaching in a monolingual/monocultural, non-English speaking environment can at times be frustrating. Teachers want their students to genuinely communicate with each other in socially acceptable ways, and at the same time become more aware of cultural traits. What is needed in a classroom is a reaction that is real because it is spontaneous. This is where jokes and funny stories can come in handy. In a classroom setting made up of students from the same linguistic and cultural background, a laugh or a groan is at least a more immediate and sincere response to a speech act than the granting of an invented request or the acceptance of an unowned apology. The value of relating a funny story lies in the commitment required of the student telling it and in the observable and sincere response that he/she elicits from the student who listens to it. Rarely do these elements intrude on the English classroom. In the telling of a funny story, the commitment resides not with the truth of information being expressed, or even one's adherence to a view point about an issue--the usual kinds of activities in classrooms. Usually these two varieties of commitment lead to obviousness on the one hand or unfair culpability on the other. Telling funny stories makes a student accountable for the success of the speech act itself, i.e. the proof is in the pudding. Likewise, the responses to a funny story are not programmed by either the student's own culture or that of the teacher. Rather, they are the result of real cultural factors: the sense of humor extent in the L2 culture that may or may not be shared with the L1 culture. They are signaled explicitly by the behavior, not just the word, of the participants. In this article, the author provides an activity on story jokes. (Contains 1 footnote.)