Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

The Game of Things We Can’t Talk About: Mary Roach’s Stiff Edition

Taboo is a central motif throughout Stiff, and it’s how much of Western culture feels about the subject of death. Taboo is also a popular word guessing game first created by Parker Brothers in 1989. In the first part of this activity, students will create their own Stiff-themed word guessing game similar to the game of Taboo.

Part A: First, have students split into small groups. In each small group, one person should be designated as the “clue giver.” Next, have each small group write 20 words associated with the content, themes, motifs, and characters of Stiff on index cards (1 word per index card). The words could be as broad as “cadaver” or as specific as “Dennis Shanahan,” the injury analyst Roach interviews in Chapter 5 of the book. Have each small group exchange their stack of cards with the group adjacent to them, giving the stack to the designated clue giver. Instruct the clue giver not to look at the cards. Then, have each group go one-by-one, and have the clue giver attempt to get their team to guess each word without saying the word on the card; if they say the word on the card, they are disqualified. The winner is whichever group gets through the greatest number of words in one minute and thirty seconds.

Part B: Tell the students, as a second part to the game, you will now be doing an “exquisite corpse,” which is a parlor game and technique that was used by Surrealist movement artists such as André Breton and Pierre Reverdy to spark creativity. Instruct each member of the winning team in Part A to take out a blank sheet of paper. For the next 1 minute, that group shall free draw—their drawing can be related to Stiff and how it made them feel, but it doesn’t have to be. After one minute, each member of the group should hand their drawing to a member of the second-place team; the second-place team should spend one minute building on their drawings. Go through this process until all the groups have added to the drawing. Then, once the drawings are returned to their original owners from the winning group, have them show them to the entire class.

Teaching Suggestion: Take note of any darkly humorous moments that came up in either part of this activity and relate them back to the motif of gallows humor and how students may have taken on some of Mary Roach’s irreverent authorial voice. In Part B, discuss how the Surrealists, in a roundabout kind of way, found the “cadaver” just as useful for their art as Mary Roach’s actual cadavers are for science and innovation: They found this exercise to be profoundly useful in enriching and inspiring creativity; the “exquisite corpse” exercise lad to artistic innovation and advancement; and there is also an element of spirituality and sacrilege in this parlor game, which was very much aligned with the overall Surrealist ethos.

Paired Text Extension:

You can also have students look at the resultant art from the original Surrealist “exquisite corpse” games:

• Cadavre exquis from February 9, 1938, held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
• Exquisite Corpses from 1928-2000, held at the Museum of Modern Art