It’s difficult to quantify the extent of the current comedy boom, but a glance at the statistics provides a sketch of the field’s growth. In 2005, to use one metric, there were only 10 cable and prime-time scripted comedies on air, according to numbers tallied by FX Networks Research. By 2014 that number had risen to 84, and topped out at over 90 last year. According to Nielsen, 7 percent of around 325,000 broadcast minutes were devoted to comedy programs in 2009, a number that jumped to 18 percent of almost 440,000 minutes in 2014. On cable that percentage only rose to 5 percent, from 4 percent over the same time period, but cable as a whole exploded in those years, and that one-percentage-point increase represents almost two million additional minutes of programming.

At Emerson, the comedy major is the brainchild of Martie Cook, a professor in the visual and media arts department and a former writer for “Full House” and “Charles in Charge.” For years, her suggestion of a comedy degree had encountered the same objection from skeptical colleagues: Can you really teach someone to be funny? She thinks that question misses the point. “What they don’t understand is that’s not what we’re doing,” Cook says. “We’re not in the business of saying the most serious person on the planet is going to come to us and they’re going to be funny.”

After consistently making her case and laying out the benefits of such a degree, Cook got the approval to design a comedy minor, which began in the fall of 2014, as a sort of trial run to see how the logistics might work and what interest from students would look like. Cook cobbled the minor together from a number of classes related to comedy that were already being taught as part of other majors. When 45 students declared for it this past fall semester, the college realized that the time for a comedy major had definitely come. Emerson agreed to expand the comedy program and made Cook the director.

One reason Michaele Whelan, the college’s chief academic officer since 2013, embraced Cook’s idea was a desire to foster further interdisciplinary programs at the college. Another new major, in the business of creative enterprises, will start next year, encouraging arts-focused students to learn how to apply business skills to their artistic practice. Like the comedy major, it applies a career-oriented gloss to a degree that might otherwise be considered risky, or even frivolous. It’s as if they were designed specifically to placate anxious parents. In order to sell the comedy degree to the board, Cook had to make it clear that this was a theoretically rigorous course of study, that can draw on Shakespeare and Freud and other figures of the Western canon – and just a little more Woody Allen than usual. Some courses are more clearly vocational than what you might expect, more like studio-arts courses than anything else. For example, in Comedy Writing for Television, students will enact a microcosm of a Hollywood writers’ room, creating spec-scripts for existing television shows, punching up one another’s work and growing accustomed to the crushing succession of indignities that make up the life of the comedic professional. The first and hardest step toward learning to be funny is coming to terms with how unfunny you are today.