Humor Series
April 3rd, 2006 by Steve Pavlina
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For the remainder of this week, I’ll be blogging a series on humor as it relates to personal development. Several of my friends are humor speakers with decades of experience, and they’ve agreed to contribute plenty of interesting content for this series. All of them have started blogs of their own this year (thanks in part to my prodding), so I’ll be linking to their articles throughout the week. These people have been my mentors in developing my humor skills over the past year. The focus of this series won’t be on cracking jokes per se. Rather it will be on how to develop your humor skills as well as how you can use humor as a tool to enhance your life.
Despite the serious tone of some of my articles, I tend to be quite a jokester in private. I love to joke around with people, and my wife and I normally share a lot of laughs every day. In my Toastmasters meetings, we do something at the end of every meeting called Observational Humor. Basically we try to point out something funny to say based on the content of the meeting. Often we will collectively come up with at least a couple dozen jokes. This practice has helped me a great deal in finding humor in any situation. I’ve also been blown away by how many original jokes the more experienced members can create.
Some people believe you’re either born funny or you’re not. While this may be true to some extent, it’s certainly possible to build your humor skills through practice. Partly humor is an art, but there is some learnable science behind it too. And in this series, you’ll learn some specific techniques you can use to develop your own humor skills and how you can benefit by more deliberately applying the sense of humor you’ve already developed.
Update 4/17/06: Here are the links to all the posts in this series:
- Humor: Laughing Your Way to Health
- Humor: How to Develop a Sharp Wit
- Humor: How to Write Funny Lines
- Humor: Sources for Humor
- Humor: In the Workplace
- Humor: How to Make Your Boss Laugh
April 20th, 2006 at 4:48 am
The Church of Teh Funny
In the beginning the world was devoid of humor. The prophet saw sadness in the people and promised them teh funny. But the people were as sheep and would not follow. In his quest to deliver teh funny and gain their attention the prophet wore…