Harnessing Humor
Burmark (2011) points out a remarkable statistic. Pre-school
children laugh over four hundred times a day, while the average adult only
laughs about 35 times a day. She jokingly states that the decline in laughter
seems to parallel the K-12 curriculum in the United States. I hope that this
statement is not true or I am through training to be an educator. One of the
most important aspects of humor is the element of surprise, a twist at the end
of the road. She briefly mentions wit, mirth and laughter as defining humor. A
twist in the order of lines in a joke is another laughter technique. To make
humor effective, we have to connect our content to the humor. The reason is
that the brain likes to make connections from the known to the unknown. We have
to remember that we are responsible for making the audiences remember, so we do
not want humor that is disconnected.
I have always enjoyed presentations that include small
cartoons, sketches, wit or other elements of surprise. They catch me off guard
and help me to connect to the presenter. I do not think it is necessary to have
barrel rolling laughter to be effective. In fact, you have to be careful with
humor, especially to excess, or the audience will not take you seriously. A
tiny element of surprise is sufficient to get my attention.
References
Burmark,
L. (2011). Harnessing Humor.
In They snooze, you lose: The educator’s guide to successful presentations (pp.
93-107). San Francisco, CA: Josey Bass.
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