2. Literature Review 2.1 Theoretical issues 2.1.1 Listening anxiety For some time, educators have recognized the existence of foreign language anxiety and its potential for significant interference with language learning and production. In 1986, Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope defined FL anxiety as ”a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 128). In fact, it is widely accepted that anxiety plays a crucial role while learning a foreign language. The impact of such an emotional arousal in language learning has long been considered in language classroom. Much of the past studies have been conducted on the aspect of anxiety associated with oral production in L2; however, recently interest has been extended to cover all language skills (Kimura, 2008). One of these skills is listening. During listening process, different factors may cause uneasiness and tension for language learners and result in poor listening. Young (1992) stated that poor listening ability results from many factors, such as insufficient emphasis on listening, immature teaching methodologies, ineffective listening strategies, and students#8217; lack of vocabulary, but the increasingly important one is anxiety. It plays a very important role because the anticipation of foreign language use in receiving information can provoke anxiety. According to Scarcella and Oxford (1992), listening anxiety occurs when students face a task they feel is too difficult or unfamiliar. Young (1992) also stated that listening comprehension is highly anxiety-provoking if the discourse is incomprehensible. Learners may feel anxious while listening in the target language due to some difficulties associated with FL listening. Generally, as defined by Oxford (1993) listening is a complex, problem-solving skill and it is more than just perception of the sounds. Listening includes comprehension of meaning-bearing words, phrases, clauses, sentences and connected discourse. It is usually a hard skill to master in one#8217;s own language, let alone in another language. Besides, such difficulties may be increased during international exams. In relation to listening section of IELTS, Rasti (2009) stated that most IELTS candidates find listening as one of the most difficult sections of IELTS due to the fact that it is both fast and confusing. Moreover, perhaps the biggest problem that candidates have with the IELTS academic listening test is that the listening recording is only played once. Therefore, they fear from losing some parts while listening. In this respect, because listening is a challenging skill for foreign language learners in general and causes difficulty, studying positive effects of humorous song on listening anxiety may help to overcome many problems related to target language listening. 2.1.2 Listening comprehension This study is based on second language classroom. We only choose L2 listening comprehension as the object of study. For the purposes of this study, we operationalize L2 listening comprehension the same way as Buck (2001, p. 114), that is, as the ability to 1) process extended samples of realistic spoken language, automatically and in real time; 2) understand the linguistic information that is unequivocally included in the text; and, 3) make whatever inferences are unambiguously implicated by the content of the passage. This default construct is sufficiently flexible and broad to fit most contexts and to allow listeners to demonstrate their comprehension ability in real-life listening contexts. As a comprehension process, listening shares many important characteristics with reading (Bae amp; Bachman, 1998; Kintsch, 1998; Samuels, 1987). Both require receptive language processing, which involves decoding and interpretation. Both processes, therefore, use two basic knowledge sources: linguistic knowledge (e.g., vocabulary and syntax) and world knowledge (e.g., topic, text structure, schema, and culture) for purposes of text comprehension. Like reading, listening also entails top-down and bottom-up processing to apply these knowledge sources to the language input during comprehension. Both listening and reading necessitate cognitive processing that is flexible and adaptable to task demands in order to construct in memory a mental representation of what has been comprehended. Finally, the success of both listening and reading is influenced by additional factors, such as metacognition and motivation (Grabe, 2009; Vandergrift, 2005). 2.1.3 Humorous song With the decline of the dominance of structural syllabi in EFL classrooms, humor was implicitly reintroduced alongside a new emphasis on its authentic, relaxed and creative effects in language learning (Byrant, Comisky amp; Zillman, 1979; Zillman and Byrant,1983). Humor actually came to be employed to produce a resourceful encouraging lesson, not only for elementary levels, but also at upper-intermediate and advanced levels. The concept of humor is associated with the concept of interest, laughter, smiling jokes, ect. The effects of humor in language classrooms could be the injection of motivation, removing anxiety and stress and creating a comfortable environment for foreign language learners (Deneire, 1995). Humor can be regarded as a reinforcing tool to make students remember what they should know about the central part of every culture and also know something about the traditions and beliefs of that culture (Guegan amp; Fisher, 1975). Higbee (1996) believes that attention is one of the key factors in learning, as students need to pay attention to a concept in order to remember it. Also Girdfanny (2004) advises teachers to use humor in language classrooms because when they use it, the students pay more attention in order to not miss any of the jokes or witticisms. Beside that, humor can open students to new ideas and increase their motivation, because they are more willing to take risks and view mistakes as opportunities for learning (ibid: p, 18). Beside the effects of humor, one can regard the effects of song in language learning. Song can have a two-fold effect in the process of language learning. The first effect is the one like humor, as a tool to release the tension and anxiety caused by the process of language learning (Langfit, 1994). The other aspect of song is its relationship with the underlying principles and the mental processing of language at the metalevel (Fiske, 1993; Heller amp; Campbell, 1981;Sloboda, 1985; Swain, 1986).