{"id":304523,"date":"2020-10-29T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2020-10-29T06:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/formnutrition.com\/us\/?p=304523"},"modified":"2020-10-29T13:30:57","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T17:30:57","slug":"why-humour-is-a-superpower-we-should-all-learn-to-harness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formnutrition.com\/us\/inform\/why-humour-is-a-superpower-we-should-all-learn-to-harness\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Humour Is a Superpower We Should All Learn To Harness"},"content":{"rendered":"

We could all do with a laugh right now. So new book Humour, Seriously: Why Humour Is A Superpower At Work And In Life<\/a><\/em>, published this month, comes as welcome light relief. And it is seriously funny – even though, as it points out, unpicking the anatomy of humour is often likened to dissecting a frog: \u201cFew people care and the frog dies\u201d.<\/p>\n

With a foreword by former Pixar president Ed Catmull and an afterword by The Big Short author Michael Lewis, Humour, Seriously is not, however, lightweight. It\u2019s based – no joke – on a course at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where co-author and behavioural psychologist Dr. Jennifer Aaker<\/a> is a professor. When her fellow co-author Naomi Bagdonas<\/a> isn\u2019t lecturing there, she runs a strategy consultancy and coaches executives and celebs to appear on TV shows, including US topical sketch show Saturday Night Live. Bagdonas herself performs comedy, plus teaches improv to inmates at San Francisco county jail to improve their resilience.<\/p>\n

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Even before the haha-pocalypse that is the current news cycle, laughs were for many of us already in almost as short supply as kettlebells. The average 4-year-old laughs 300 times a day – the same amount as the average 40-year-old laughs every two and a half months. According to a Gallup poll of 1.4m people in 166 countries, our LOL count drops off a \u201chumour cliff\u201d around the age of 23. Why the long faces? According to the co-authors, \u201cWe grow up, enter the workforce and become \u2018serious and important people\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Humour At Work<\/h2>\n

But even the most important and seemingly serious people find time for humour. Take US President George W Bush teasing the new chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors on wearing tan socks with a dark grey suit. Everybody else turned up to the next briefing sporting a pair, showing solidarity (and socks). Or US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright performing a take on \u201cMaria\u201d from West Side Story<\/em> with her Russian counterpart Yevgeny Primakov at the formal gala dinner of an international summit. They dubbed their version \u201cEast West Story\u201d.<\/p>\n

Laughter releases the \u201ctrust hormone\u201d oxytocin in a way that, as the co-authors quip, is \u201cstill permitted by HR\u201d, quickly building relationships and bolstering them over time.<\/p>\n

Even if the stakes are lower in your own line of work, incorporating humour might still seem like risky business. But if you\u2019re afraid of the ramifications, the joke might be on your workplace\u2019s culture. As Hiroki Asai, the erstwhile head of Apple\u2019s Creative Design Studio (now Airbnb\u2019s global head of marketing), says, \u201cFear is the greatest killer of creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asai invited humour to all-hands meetings of his 2,000-plus team at Apple by playing a video of some of them dressed up as the Blue Man Group and scheduling a performance from a flash-mob gospel choir. Such stunts \u201cchased fear from the system\u201d, emboldening his team to think and speak more freely. While at Sun Microsystems, former Google chairman Eric Schmidt once found that pranksters had disassembled and reassembled a Volkswagen Beetle in his office overnight. He held meetings in the car.<\/p>\n

Comedy And Creativity<\/h2>\n

After all, humour\u00a0<\/span>is<\/span><\/em>\u00a0creativity. The University of Southern California tasked professional funny people, amateur comedians, and average jokers to caption\u00a0<\/span>New Yorker<\/span><\/em>\u00a0cartoons; across the board, MRI scans showed greater activity in brain regions associated with creativity in the subjects told to come up with humorous captions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology pitted card-carrying comedians against product designers and students in a humorous caption competition followed by a brainstorming session; the comedians generated 20 percent more ideas, which were rated by other people as 25 percent more creative. (<\/span>The resulting PhD dissertation was titled \u201cHaha And Aha!\u201d<\/span><\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n

Humour fosters psychological safety: \u201cthe belief that we won\u2019t be punished or ridiculed when we make a mistake\u201d. That makes us more open-minded, motivated, and persistent. Just the\u00a0<\/span>anticipation<\/span><\/em>\u00a0of laughter decreases so-called \u201cstress hormone\u201d cortisol<\/a>, lower levels of which are correlated with enhanced cognitive function.<\/span><\/p>\n

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