“Good morning, my friends, colleagues, and fellow custodians of 37 unreturned copies of Dog Man. Before librarianship, I trained in comedy writing at Second City in Chicago—the same place where Tina Fey, Chris Farley, Bill Murray, Stephen Colbert, and many other non-librarians learned improv comedy. As it turns out, that experience perfectly prepared me for school librarianship because both fields feature a chaotic audience, saying ‘Yes, and…,’ and pretending I know what’s going on.

Librarians and improv actors both play many roles. We’re teachers, tech support, emotional support humans, furniture movers, data analysts, and part-time magicians. We’re part educator, part therapist, and full-time chaos coordinators.

What the craft of comedy taught me—and what librarianship reminds me of every day—is that laughter represents connection. The past few years haven’t been easy. School librarians are carrying an emotional load few understand.

At the 2025 AASL conference, I hosted an IdeaLab table with Rain Smith called The Humble Brag. We invited visitors to fill a wall with sticky stars—each one a ‘win’—because librarians are terrible at celebrating themselves. We’ll build research units that develop the latest media literacy skills, and when someone says, ‘Wow, that was amazing,’ we respond, ‘Oh, it was nothing.’ But humility, if weaponized, becomes invisibility, and invisibility is how we lose funding, voice, and respect.

The battles some of us are fighting are more than overdue books. We are fighting battles over something much bigger: truth. And truth, right now, is under siege. As you know, they come for the librarians first. But they also come quickly for the comedians. So, at this point, I’m basically standing in the center of a very nervous Venn diagram.

It’s okay if you don’t feel like laughing some days. But when laughter sneaks back in, that’s your resilience reminding you it’s still there. Humor is healing. It’s how we process, connect, and recover.

Humor is advocacy in disguise—a secret weapon in a profession that has to fight for every inch of respect, every dollar of funding, and every minute of instructional time.

Humor keeps us human—and it keeps our students engaged. Every time we make someone laugh, we remind them that the library is a place of joy and belonging. Every time we make someone laugh, we humanize our profession. And when our students see us laugh through the hard days, they learn resilience.

Humor is resistance. When we laugh, we remind ourselves and our students that joy isn’t naïve, even on the darkest of days. It’s radical. Humor turns stress into stories and exhaustion into connection. Every giggle in your library is proof that hope hasn’t checked out yet.”

Hallie Rich

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, LIBRARY JOURNAL 
AND SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
hrich@mediasourceinc.com