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Discover ways to make people laugh
Thursday, 20 April 2006
One of the best skills you can learn to improve your relations with others is the ability to make people laugh. Everybody loves someone who can make them giggle. Being able to do so will help your career, your friendships and your business dealings.
Everybody thinks they have a good sense of humor, but many never bother trying to improve it. A sense of humor is something that can be learned and developed over time. The best way to learn about humor is to consume a lot of it - watch funny TV shows, funny movies and read funny books. When you come across something that makes you and others laugh, examine it and try to learn its secrets.
Ask yourself:
- Why is it funny?
- How is the punch-line timed?
- How is the rest of the piece timed?
- What other situations could this same technique be used in?
- Is there something in my life that is also funny because of a similar circumstance?
- How can I strip this technique down to its raw components?
Take for example the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch, which you can read here. Many people find this very funny and it is a famous piece of comedy. It involves four middle-aged men from Yorkshire sitting around discussing how tough their childhoods were. Gradually, their one-upmanship reaches ridiculous levels, and they're describing childhood traumas that couldn't possibly be true.
Here's a snippet:
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
This sketch uses a number of popular comedy techniques, which you can apply straight away. It presents a situation that we're all familiar with and many find annoying - somebody talking about how difficult their life has been. It then exaggerates beyond all reasonableness the stories told, but is presented in a way where the speaker clearly wants us to believe it's true. The sketch also highlights a pathetic human weakness - the need to outdo our peers no matter how petty the competition.
After reading the sketch, ask yourself - how can I apply this to make others laugh if the situation presents itself. How about if a friend starts talking about how poor they were as a student? Or how terrible their first car was? Or how mean their boss was in their last job? Or how much they hated working at McDonalds?
But don't just stop with this sketch, examine any funny situation you come across. Once you think you've worked out the bare-bones of the technique used, try telling a joke about it to someone you know. In fact, collect jokes to tell and try them out on people.
Watch your audience's reaction carefully. What made them laugh? What didn't? Was it the situation itself that was funny, or the way the joke was delivered?
Like all learning processes, you'll get better at this with practice. Just respect your audience and watch them carefully. If you get something wrong, try and work out why.
Take the time and effort to learn, and you'll soon find you have the skill to make others laugh. And the better you can become at that, the more smoothly your relationships will run.
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