Catching up with Karyn

One of the signs that someone is a great leader is that their team isn't afraid to approach them when they need help or support. Murphy's Law touches every industry. No workplace is free of difficulties. The way a leader responds to these difficulties has a direct and profound impact on the morale and collective resilience of the organization.

Some of the most fascinating neurological research out there has to do with the way our bodies react in anticipation of an event. The events we're anticipating can be positive - knowing you're going to meet your funniest friend for a drink after work - or negative - telling your boss that a critical report is way behind schedule.

When we're looking forward to something good, we begin to experience some of the pleasure of the event before it even happens. Our blood pressure goes down, our circulation goes up, and we feel more energized and emotionally resilient.

When we are looking toward something bad, we experience some of the negative...

Selling real estate requires a unique combination of skills. Not only must realtors know everything there is to know about the homes they're selling and the neighborhood those homes reside in, but they must also understand the tangled process of financing a home purchase.

On top of that, they need tremendous people skills, to attract buyers, understand what their needs are, identify the best properties for them, and provide support and encouragement through the home-buying process.

Humor is one of the most essential - yet seldom discussed - tools the real estate agent has at his or her disposal. The realtor who knows how to use laughter to begin relationships sells more homes.

I saw a great example of this on social media this morning (Thanks, @sjsincanada!) There are plenty of people who'd shy away from buying property near a cemetery - blame it on too many late-night horror shows or cultural traditions that are uncomfortable with the idea of being too close to the departed - but...

Humor is a powerful force. For more than 30 years, I've been researching, teaching, and speaking to groups about the ways they can use humor to lower stress, live healthier lives, be more productive in the workplace, and be happier at home. That's why I was absolutely heartbroken to learn that Jacintha Saldanha, a British nurse, took her own life after being duped by a radio DJ's prank.

This tragic incident reinforces the fact that humor is power. We all have a responsibility to understand how our humor impacts others. Pranks are a particularly problematic type of humor, as their entire humor value comes from someone else's pain and discomfort. Their fear, upset, or injury has become our source of amusement.

That's not healthy for us individually, and it's not healthy for us as a society. I've been very encouraged to see the discussions centering around the role of pranks in our media and culture. At a time when the problem of bullying is receiving so much attention, let's call...

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." George Bernard Shaw

September 11th. 9/11. You know what day it is today. You know it, even though it's been many years. You know it, even though the New York Times and the New York Post aren't treating the anniversary as a front-page story this year. You know what day it is today.

Is it a day to laugh?

One of the questions that comes up often in discussions about therapeutic humor - leveraging the healing power of laughter to help us cope better and more effectively with trauma and stress - is if any topics are off-limits, where laughter is taboo. It's a question that comes up, especially at this time of year, when people are confronted, once again, with the memories of a uniquely painful event.

Humor & Healing: What's The Relationship

Before we talk about whether or not it's appropriate to laugh about the events of a particular day, it helps to understand why people want...

Do you know what really ticks me off? When people don’t take Lyme Disease seriously. This condition – which can be truly devastating – is often ignored or dismissed as even a possibility until the symptoms become debilitating. By that point, treatment is difficult and expensive – and often, not covered by insurance.

As a nurse, humorist, and professional speaker, I was really glad to see this story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about Carol Fox – also a nurse – who has devoted her life to teaching people about Lyme Disease. Carol uses two powerful tools – humor and art – to present the facts about Lyme Disease to her community.

This is an effective approach for a number of reasons. People are overwhelmed by information today. We’re all wired up, connected to our smartphones and tablet computers every minute of the day. You can’t avoid being inundated by health attention. There are messages about blood pressure and cholesterol...

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,...

You might not have an immediate answer to that question. Business is hard work. Owning and operating a business can consume your life.  Working for somebody else – whether that’s in operations, marketing, hr, or the dreaded accounting division – isn’t necessarily a piece of cake, either.  We devote tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources to our work because so much depends on being successful.

Surely this is no laughing matter.

Laughing is the best thing you can do. We’d even argue that you have to laugh if you want to succeed. Don’t believe us? Just ask the people at Southwest.  Their uniquely humorous approach has earned them significant goodwill and provided them with a valuable differentiator in a crowded and competitive marketplace.

You see, it turns out that the strategic use of humor is one of the single most important tools businesses have at their disposal.  The ability to use humor:

• effectively attracts...

There’s absolutely nothing funny about the BP oil spill. No one would argue that – yet people are still laughing. (For example, see BP Spills Coffee)  If there’s one lesson we can take away from this entire tragedy, it’s that humor can fill numerous roles, some of which aren’t immediately obvious.

Humor Provides a Framework for Processing Tragedy

“The oil spill is getting bad,” David Letterman said, “There is so much oil and tar now in the Gulf of Mexico, Cubans can now walk to Miami.” Confronted with an environmental disaster of unimaginable scope, we reach for ways to make sense of it all. Letterman’s joke captured the scale of the spill in an unexpected way – weaving in some social commentary guaranteed to get a laugh from his audience -  deftly informing and assuring his audience that the situation was indeed that bad.

In a similar vein, we see the quips about BP’s new bio-degradable oil...

Obviously, he wasn’t. Thinking, that is. Michael Richards, better known to the world as Kramer, took his funny and light-hearted image he’d established over his successful career with Seinfeld, and flushed it down the tubes. I can just picture him skidding into Jerry’s apartment, shaking like an electrically charged, over-caffeinated baffoon, uttering “Oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh nooooooooooooooooo!”

“Oh no” is right. Whether you’re dealing with hecklers, irritable coworkers or cranky customers—insulting them is a bad idea. Comediennes anticipate that these things will happen, and they have comebacks that are so practiced that they can appear to be spontaneous—but few professional comics will leave those situations to chance.

There’s something you can learn from Michael Richards’ common sense infarct. We all have times when have to deal with hostility from others. A lot of times, if we’d thought about it,...