Laughter’s the Best Medicine

So a dyslexic man walks into a bra.

Everyone loves a good joke, right? Humor has been used to varying degrees of success in the ad business. But highlighting the campaigns that have used it successfully – and those that haven’t – is not the purpose of this post (but might very well be in the future.)

Rather, I’d like to call your attention to a talk by Chris Bliss at TEDxRanier. For those of us in the communication business, the point of his talk – “the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives” – is pretty compelling.

“…comedy takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world.” Isn’t that exactly what most of us are working to do each and every day: change perception, and ultimately the underlying behaviors associated with those perceptions? (Maybe humor is the antidote we’re looking for to change consumer habits..?)

He goes on to say: “A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it’s going over here and then all of a sudden you’re transported over here. And there’s this mental delight that’s followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain. And just like that, you’ve been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses. This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate. Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin, which throws our walls up sky-high. And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest — race, religion, politics, sexuality — only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view.”

Plenty of other good stuff in the talk (like the fact that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows), so check it out.

And I’ll leave you with this: a seal walks into a club…