Use Humor to Defuse Tension, Befriend and still have More Fun
Humor requires a target. If one makes a bulls-eye out of someone weaker, notably if you initiate the attack, you search like a bully. Take aim, instead, in the powerful. Or, as an alternative to getting upset, consider yourself lucky when someone makes you a target first.
Because, as Isaac Asimov observed, "For a humane person, the put-down is most satisfactory and most easily greeted with pleasurable laughter if your person being set down has done something to ask it - to put it differently, if he has attacked. It's lunge-and-riposte and at the riposte you can laugh with a clear conscience."
Poke Fun at Yourself
When you make oneself the butt with the joke one demonstrates unifying humor. Self-deprecating people build trust, get heard and get ahead. They look at ease with themselves - an endearing quality. Here's six examples:
1. All I ask is definitely the chance to prove those funds can't make me happy.
2. Sylvia's mother gave this toast at her 60th house party: "Time may be a great healer, however it's a lousy beautician."
3. Phyllis Diller said, "I determine what got me into comedy... puberty!"
4. Lily Tomlin, in their own one-woman show, "The Search for Signs and symptoms of Intelligent Life from the Universe said "If love is definitely the answer, could you please rephrase the question?"
5. Numbers are usually not my strong suit. Once i had added up a low cost on a hand calculator and come up with three different totals, my offer partner once quipped, "There are three sorts of people: those who can count, and those that can't."
6. "I had an IQ test. Final results came back negative." ~ Jake Torkelsen
Defuse Anxiety
"Those oxygen masks on airplanes? I would not think there's really any oxygen. There's no doubt that they're just to muffle the screams." - Rita Rudner
Kid Of a Common Situation
The next best thing to solving an issue is finding some humor inside it," thought Frank Clark. Hearing what's funny in a group also enables someone to instantly understand what isn't safe to laugh at.
When your humor highlights might know about have in common, you and I feel much more like "us." Joking with co-workers builds bonds.
Women say they want someone who makes them laugh. Men want someone whom they could make laugh.
The Harvard Business Review reported that executives with a sense of humor climb the corporate ladder more quickly and create extra income than their counterparts."
"One hallmark of a great manager is a self-deprecating sense of humor," reported by a Half survey. Yet, you can take that finding with a grain of salt because people are much more likely to laugh at jokes made by their superiors than their inferiors, and in the presence of a person of high status, persons in the same group will check whether the superior is laughing before laughing themselves.
Sometimes (although not always), "if people are enjoying yourselves, they're going to work harder."
Examples of unifying humor that take advantage of the universal "us" can turn up most anywhere:
o Following mad cow scare, a subscriber to my newsletter, mailed me this bumper sticker: "Montana - At the very least our cows are sane!"
o Commenting around the human condition: "God pulled an all-nighter around the sixth day."
o I saw this emblazoned around the tee shirt of a rotund man coming out of a Los angeles beach shop: "The trouble with the gene pool is the fact that there is no lifeguard."
For stating the obvious, look at some newspaper headlines:
"Study Finds Sex, Pregnancy Link" ~ Cornell Daily Sun
"Lack of Brains Hinders Research" ~ The Columbus Dispatch
Lily Tomlin said, "Nobody will be here without a reason. ... I'm keen on a huge range of comedy on the other hand always wanted my comedy to generally be more embracing with the species rather than debasing than it."
For another humor-as-unifying experience, get one of these laughter yoga class. "Laughter isn't dissimilar to exercise," explains professor Lee Berk. "It's not about to cure someone of stage 3 cancer, in terms of prevention it will make sense. In a sense, we've got our own apothecary on our shoulders. Positive emotions just like laughter affect your biology."
Evoke the Incongruous to Unite Others
A condemned spy had been led out at dawn in a pounding rain to generally be shot. As he brilliant guards stepped outside he spoke bitterly directly to them about the wet and cold, in which one guard replied, "What will you be complaining about? We have to march back."
Dave Barry: "Never require a sleeping pill plus a laxative on the same night."
Paul Klee: "A lines are a dot that went for any walk."
Understanding how to hit the funny bone is quiet difficult, even with these tips and examples. As E.B. White famously noted, "Analyzing humor is actually dissecting a frog. The process kills the essence of both the frog and the funny - then what's the point?"
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Then you can find those who appear to have no humor whatsoever. Usually that lack covers other concerns. What effect are they using on others?