Learn a little about what makes you laugh. Laughter itself is unconscious. While it's possible for us to keep ourselves from laughing (not always successfully), it is very hard for us to produce laughter on demand, and doing so will usually seem 'forced'. Fortunately, laughter is very contagious (we're about 30 times more likely to laugh in the presence of others), and in a social context, it's easy to start laughing when others are laughing. • Studies have shown that three things make us laugh the most: a sense of superiority over someone else behaving 'dumber' than us; a difference between our expectation of something and the actual result; or welcome relief from an. Learn to laugh in boring or unfunny circumstances. It's good to know that the less funny a place is, the easier it becomes to add the element of humorous surprise. It might be easier to get people to laugh about an office workplace than to get people to laugh in a comedy club. • This is why The Office, the NBC show, uses an office as its setting: it's about as boring as it gets. They even process paper. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() One of a kind e-book teaching you how to be funny in just 7 days flat! How to be FUNNY! Author: Stanley Lyndon. Get Ebook Now. Stanley Lyndon 1 ePub eBooks Collection. Stanley Lyndon - How to be Funny.pdf. How boring is that?! We're not used to looking at an office as a funny place, so when it is funny, it's especially funny. Learn to appreciate witty wordplay and puns. A lot of the time, comedy comes from linguistic confusion (unintentional) or linguistic playfulness (intentional). We sometimes find things humorous when there's a gap between our words and our meanings. • Freudian slips are linguistic errors that are believed to expose what you were really thinking rather than what you 'meant' to say, and are often of a sexual nature. • Witty wordplay is more intentional: 'A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.' Or this one, where the words 'hockey' and 'fight' are switched: 'I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.' Appreciate irony. There's perhaps nothing in comedy more widely cited but more thoroughly misunderstood than irony. Irony occurs when there is a gap between our expectations of a statement, situation, or image and the actual experience of it. • Comedian Jackie Mason illustrates irony with a joke: 'My grandfather always said, 'Don't watch your money; watch your health.' So one day while I was watching my health, someone stole my money. It was my grandfather.' • This joke messes with one of our fundamental expectations: that grandparents are nice, friendly people who are utterly harmless, and that the advice they offer should be sincere.The joke is funny because, in it, we are presented with a grandparent who is rascally, thievish, and double-crossing. Take yourself less. Remember the most embarrassing moments in your life so far, the monumental stuff-ups, the times you refused to make changes, the breakdowns in communications that you played a major part in, and maybe even the time you tried to be funny around your friends and only crickets chirped. These things can be hilarious. • Telling other people about very embarrassing moments in your life is a great way to get them to laugh. Take a page from famous improv comic Colin Mochrie, who said: 'He had the kind of face only a mother could love, if that mother was blind in one eye and had that kind of milky film over the other. But still, he was my identical twin.' Put yourself under the spotlight. Tell self-depracating jokes rather than making jokes at the expense of others. More people will be more willing to laugh. Rodney Dangerfield made fun of both his sanity and his looks with this one: 'I went to the psychiatrist, and he says 'You're crazy.' I tell him I want a second opinion. He says, 'Okay, you're ugly too!' ' • Redd Foxx had this to say about his silly devotion to drugs and alcohol: 'I feel sorry for people who don’t drink or do drugs. Because someday they’re going to be in a hospital bed, dying, and they won’t know why.' • A great joke from Henry Youngman: 'I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother.' Know your audience. Different things make different people laugh. Some people find that sensationalism causes them to laugh; others find that does the trick. Learn which is which, and deliver your jokes and anecdotes so that they apply to many different categories of humor and emotion at once. • Not everyone knows what it's like to ride in a helicopter or be a millionaire or have a baby. But most people know what it's like to go fast, fantasize about money, and love another person deeply. So make your jokes cover more ground by utilizing really basic, but profound, human emotions. • When you're in a group of people you don't know, listen to what subjects they're talking about and what's making them laugh. Are they the witty banter type? The slapstick, or physical comedy type? The better you know someone, the easier it will be to make them.
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