Catching up with Karyn

One of my best friends sent me a hysterical joke via email this morning. I read it very first thing this morning. I laughed so hard I almost woke all of the sleeping people in my home up!

What is this joke?

Well, here’s the thing. I’m not going to tell it to you. It just wouldn’t be a good idea. If we were together in person, and I had a better sense of who you are and what might make you laugh, I might share it with you.

But right now, in the cold, vast anonymity of the internet, it’s not a good idea.

Understanding Humor: The Power of Bond

There are some types of humor that – if they’re going to work – depend upon the person telling the joke having a common experience or worldview with the person hearing the joke. This shared set of experiences or perspectives provides a type of bond that makes it more likely that the two of you will find the same sort of thing funny.

Other people who don’t have the same experiences or worldview as...

If you’re interested in using humor to more effectively manage your diabetes, it’s good to know that you’ll find things to laugh at all around you. We live in a funny, funny world!

Some people don’t believe me when I say that. They come up to me after performances and tell me that nothing humorous ever happens when they’re in the vicinity. There are no funny headlines in their newspaper. They don’t see any funny billboards during their commute. Their world, they assure me, is totally devoid of humor.

That’s when I tell them the secret of a truly healthy diet: SPAM.

No, not that SPAM. I’ll be talking about everybody’s favorite processed pork shoulder product and the role it plays in a healthy diet in a future volume of the What’s So Funny About book series, probably in “What’s So Funny About Being a Nutritionist?”.

Today I want to talk about the other kind of SPAM. If you get e-mail, use Facebook, Twitter,...

How many times, for example, have you had a patient report Level 14 Pain – when you can get them to take a break from the animated conversation they’re having on one phone and text-fest they’re having on another? That patient is almost inevitably followed by a seriously injured person who protests that they’re "Just fine – can I go home now?" Talking them into having at least a few stitches to keep their innards in the usual places is a job in and of itself.

Humor To Help Keep Perspective

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

Mel Brooks made a critical point with this quote. It’s far easier to find humor in the things that happen to other people than it is to laugh at our own circumstances. Humor experts caution us to keep that in mind, both when we want to laugh at someone else’s situation and when people laugh at ours. Anyone of us could slip into a Pool of Unspecified Origin while en...

Answer: Pink slip… Bonus….

Question: What’s the difference between anxiety and excitement?

Seriously, though, what is the difference between being anxious and excited?

When you think about it, the two are closely related, but they differ by a degree of perspective. What is your mindset? Are you envisioning the situation you’re thinking about coming out with a positive outcome or with a negative outcome?

We know from studies that a little stress, sometimes known as eustress, can be a good thing. A little stress causes us to be alert, to be ready, to have our “game on.” To have absolutely no stress results in you being the equivalent of a puddle of protoplasm on the floor—no energy, no movement, static—not dynamic. No matter how tempting it may sound, it’s not really good to have no stress in your life!

Too much stress, however, clouds our thinking, muddles our memory, and causes us to make dumb mistakes—not to mention,...

“I’m brain dead,” my pal, Sheila, moaned over her coffee at our break. “I wouldn’t recognize a fresh idea if it jumped in my face and wiggled. I’m just not creative. Am I too left-brained? Where do you get all your ideas?”

What is creativity? Like humor, it’s a mindset, a process, a way of looking at things. Researchers once believed that creativity was found primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain; they believed “right-brained” people were more creative. Now researchers speculate that creativity involves both hemispheres, that it’s a combination of both analytic and intuitive thought.

Are you a creative person? Why is it that as children we’re able to tap into our natural creative abilities only to be stymied later as adults? Perhaps it’s because we’re taught early on to be logical, to look for the one right answer, and to be serious.

As we grow older, our creative tendencies are...