As you all know, Oscar Wilde is quite famous for a lot of quotes.

One of them goes as follows.

If you wanna tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they might kill you.

[LAUGH].

>> As you might have guessed, we're gonna talk about humor.

And more specifically, about its function and

its overall significance in effective communication.

Let me start first with a story, an anecdote.

Once upon a time, there was a king's court.

And there was a beloved and very successful jester.

He would amuse the king and all the people by the king, but

one day he actually crossed the line a bit and he insulted his king.

The king was completely infuriated so he ordered that the jester be executed.

Now what happened was that the court which loved the, the jester, pleaded by

the king to at least let the jester decide on the way that he should die.

The king actually granted that request and asked to jester.

And the jester, true to his form he said, my lord,

if it's all the same to you, I shall prefer to die of old age.

>> [LAUGH].

>> So in that sort of whimsical and

humorous response, the jester was able to save his own life.

On a more realistic and

serious note from real life, that gentleman behind me is Norman Cousins.

He was a professor of medicine at UC Berkeley.

In 1964, I think, in the 1960s, he did a trip to Russia.

He came back and he had contracted serious heart disease.

What he chose for his treatment along a lot of scientific and medical

options was to include laughter and comedy as part of his therapeutic methods.

So he'd watch funny films, he's listen to funny clips.

He'd actually try to laugh more.

And he realized that laughter and

humor really had an anesthetic effect similar to that of painkillers.

But now let's move from the realm of anecdotes and stories to the actual

science behind humor and its use in our lives and in effective communication.

Angela is gonna give a deep dive into the real science.

[SOUND].

>> So what is humor?

And more importantly, how can it help us when we think about communicating?

A hundred years ago, Charles Darwin compared humor to tickling of the brain,

and actually it turned out that he wasn't that far off.

I'm going to give you the one minute sort of humorless overview of what

humor does to our brains and

bodies and why it's so important to include as a communication tool.

So, studies have found that humor impacts us in three ways.

First, it's good for our minds, second, it's good for

our bodies, and third, it improves our social relationships.

In terms of our brains, you can see behind me the composite results of hundreds of

studies that were done on different types of patients, on different types of jokes.

The big-level takeaway is that humor engages your entire brain and

this is why it's so good for engaging your attention and improving your memory.

The other thing that we can notice about the brain and

humor is that it, it's a two step process.

First, cognitive processes kick in.

And second an emotional process kicks in that allows us to actually enjoy a joke.

In other words,

it's something that encompasses our whole being when we find something funny.

Second, humor is good for our bodies.

Medical studies have shown that when we laugh, our muscles relax,

our blood pressure drops and actually, our immunity is even boosted.

So the science actually shows that humor is good as a medicine for disease.

And finally, third, as we've all experienced.

Humor is good for our social relationships.

It allows us to diffuse tension in a situation or

address a difficult topic in a way that kind of allows us to laugh together.

So with these three reasons in mind why humor can be such a powerful

communication tool, Mahmoud is going to walk us through some practical examples.

Of this in practice and how it can really work.

>> We looked at three areas where humor could be used in

a good way to improve our, our presentation skills, basically.

The first one is introducing levity.

And here is typically we are dealing with complex situation, and

we want to make sure that we sen, we send the message very simply.

And in such a nice way to the audience.

The second, the second area where we looked at is

making the message very powerful.

There is a statement word that we use, there's a phrase that we use in

the businesses school when we are describing the product market [UNKNOWN].

Which basically goes like, you want the food to eat their own the food.

And, basically, that phase has been said in, in 1970, and

we still remember it because of the humor aspect of it.

And the fifth area where humor can be used very effectively in presentation,

in a presentation is to break the ice and engage very nicely with your audience.

We then throw out the [UNKNOWN].

That, that having a conversation with the audience is it's such a nice way to

reduce the anxiety.

And now let's, let's look at one example where we thought levit,

humor was used very nicely in levity.

In the White House correspondence.

Basically it's a dinner where the, where the President of the United State, and

in this case Barack Obama get an event where the national press in DC and

basically they take a moment to relax, get out of the wheel and laugh.

And if you look and their kind of interaction in the past

year they're basically going toes and toes to toes together.

And, and, and if you look at the, if you look at the,

basically at the dinner, you would feel three things that impact you.

First of, first of all, the first impact that it had in our service,

the person came on like a very natural and authentic.

And basically brings the, the human aspect of them, and

make us connect with them very well.

If the second thing that we,

we felt as an impact on ourself when we looked at the White House correspondent,

it's basically helped the whole thing to reset and start a new conversation.

And the third one is basically repositioning energy and

engaging, we'll see this conversation in the future.

So let's have a look.

>> I usually start these dinners with a few self-deprecating jokes.

After my stellar 2013, what could I possibly talk about?

>> [LAUGH].

>> I admit it.

Last year was rough.

Sheesh.

>> [LAUGH]

>> At one point things got so bad the 47% called Mitt Romney to apologize.

>> [LAUGH].

>> Of course we rolled out healthcare.gov.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

That could have gone better.

[LAUGH].

>> The second thing we want to talk about is using humor to amplify the power of

your message.

So in this class we've seen clips from The Daily Show.

And one of the things that we've noticed is that Jon Stewart is incredibly

effective at bringing humor to the specific political issue that

he wanted to focus on and he wanted to highlight.

And we thought that this was an incredibly,

incredibly effective way to make his message even more poignant.

But we wanted to bring something that we could relate to.

That's a national scale on a daily basis.

We wanted to think about the GSB.

Every year the GSB puts on the GSB show.

>> [LAUGH].

>> It allows the writers of the show to perhaps make their own

statements about the environment that they go to school.

In this clip, they've taken a panel and the panel is basically serving

as the staff that looks over kind of everything that we have to do.

To schedule which has its fair share of red tape.

This is how they decided to present it.

>> Good morning, welcome to the Center of Initiatives for Research Curriculum in

Learning Experiences, Joint Education, Representation Knowledge.

>> [LAUGH].

>> Or as we like to call it, the CIRCLE JERK.

>> [LAUGH].

>> There's a message there that perhaps-

>> [LAUGH].

>> More bluntly couldn't be communicated.

But, using humor as it's vehicle, I think that they get their point across.

Now, we have to say at this point, we're very aware of our pandering.

We're gonna go from JD's favorite person ,John Stewart.

To Deity's actual favorite person, Ken Dagle.

>> [LAUGH]

>> We think humor is an incredibly effective way at creating comfort with

your audience, both for the speaker and for the audience.

Everyone in this class went through the exercise with Ken.

And all that was meant to do, was bring down our anxiety, so

that when we were randomly called to the stage,

we were able to effectively communicate with our audience.

We wanted to focus on the humor of that.

In that span, in that class, we laughed.

We laughed a lot, we were uncomfortable.

But what we saw by the end of that was incredibly effective communication across

a couple different functions.

We saw great posture.

We saw a lot of confidence in the way that you stood and delivered.

We saw much fewer filler words, which to us,

suggests a great comfort with who you're presenting to.

We stopped creative topics.

I think we all remember Abby's love for the green juice blender.

And we just saw a compelling presence.

One of the things we love about humor is that we think it

gives you a presence to your audience.

Now we'll ask Manolis to come wrap it up.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

So, it is quite clear, that humor can be a very powerful agent, and

a very powerful tool, in your verbal and non-verbal communication.

What I would like you to remember is that humor is tied to the very holy grail of

effective communication, the well-known aim structure.

So in terms of the audience,

what humor does is actually create a level of comfort and trust.

It also makes the presenter more likeable and more relatable.

This is exactly what we saw at the, at the, at the exercise with Ken Dagle.

Secondly, humor can be ba, a very powerfully agent in transmitting and

bearing the presenter's intent.

That's what we saw in the anecdotal story about the jester who

managed through humor and through that whimsical way to save his own life.

And what is a higher intent than actually saving the presenter's life?

And thirdly, humor can be a very powerful tool in amplifying and

bearing the message.

And making eh, comments which would otherwise be quite caustic and

all, almost blunt.

And this is what we all, our classmates did using the GSB

show regarding the efficacy of the administration.

There's some very good news for all of you.

You can start right away to find ways to employ humor in your presentations.

There are multiple resources which are free and easily accessible.

[UNKNOWN] has a lot of content on YouTube.

You can see great speakers who have actually based their

very presentation skills on humor itself.

You can also find a lot of articles which are gonna teach you how to

use humor effectively in verbal communication.

A lot of books, which take a more scientific approach to the subject.

And a lot of webinars and videos on humor itself and

on even more specific subjects around employing humor in communication.

Thanks very much for your attention.

[MUSIC]