“Laughter is the best medicine.” This well-known line encompasses the importance of laughter and humor in today’s society. While the line is not literal, laughter can bring joy and relief to anyone, anywhere; and in that sense, it is its own form of medicine. Humor lightens the mood, makes people feel good, and brings happiness into life. At St. Paul Academy and Summit School, humor is important to the student body whether it is a comedic senior speech or jokes being cracked around the campus.

Like every school, SPA has its class clowns. One of whom is junior Duncan Fleming, a proclaimed “meme connoisseur” who has an assortment of memes for any scenario.

“I think I have a witty sense of humor, one that takes an effort to understand. I like using new cultural references to make jokes about,” Fleming said.

While using cultural references for jokes, Duncan’s favorite platform for humor is through memes.

“I use memes to create humor out of a specific situation, sometimes just to make fun of a certain topic, but also with more serious meaning,” Fleming said. “Sometimes the intent of a meme is to express deeper thoughts and feelings best displayed in an oversimplified format made confidential from many simply through the translation into a meme.”

Fleming uses memes to express his own, unique sense of humor and bring light to other people through the memes that he finds and makes.

While comedy is helpful for lightening the mood and staying happy, it also offers a way for the SPA community to stay together.

Students at SPA get too caught up in the stress of school and without comic relief, students wouldn’t be able to always stay in a positive mindset, which would make the community more uptight.

For senior Will Christakos, he used his senior speech as a platform to share his sense of humor with the school. After presenting one of the more memorable speeches this year, Christakos left the podium with the community in laughter.

“I felt that it would be more fun and memorable to me to make my speech comedic. I wanted to make fun of myself in the speech as an example of the message I was trying to convey,” Christakos said. “I thought this was the best way to give my speech and I think that making it humorous would allow the audience to loosen up a little and have a good laugh during speeches.”