“Cesar Milan says that when a dog sniffs you she’s gathering information. My dog is preparing an extensive dossier on me,” wrote Paula Poundstone.

Humor is a way to get information about each other.

How we evoke and respond to it says so much about how comfortable we are with ourselves and how flexible, open and fun we will be with others.  That’s helpful information if you are thinking of collaborating with someone – or even considering whether to get to know them better. “A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your step as you walk the tightrope of life,” wrote William Arthur Ward.

Every relationship has bumpy moments.  Humor can be quicker than praise to smooth them out. Humorless people make the bumbs bigger. “A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher, “jolted by every pebble in the road.”

Unfortunately I don’t know how to be funny nor have a humor-evoking face like Ricky Gervais – yet I am one of the first to laugh when others are.  Us “first responders” to friction can start what researchers call a laughter cascade to spur the emotional contagion that gets others laughing. Once I broke out laughing in a packed movie theatre only to hear someone yell out, to my mortification, “Kare – glad to hearing you’re enjoying it.”

“Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness,” wrote Mason Cooley (or from arguments I would add), “but enables us to move back from it a little.”

Yet humor is a two-sided sword – it can either cut and divide or unify – bring people closer like “a rubber sword – it allows you to make a point without drawing blood,” wrote Mary Hirsch.

Why inject unifying humor into a situation?

• Because it’s the best way to get us in relaxation mode – and begin to bond.  We become less fearful or tense.

• That’s when we are most likely to like each other, bring out our better sides – and be productive and creative together. “If you can get someone to laugh with you, they will be more willing to identify with you, listen to you. It parts the waters,” said Robert Orben.  As we lighten up we become more playful – which can make us productive if we need to be – and happier.

• Humor aimed at oneself is disarming – as when Chris Pronger answered a reporter’s questions, when Sandra Bullock referred to “us old people” and when President Obama said, “in mock dismay, ‘Don’t be cheering when I say that.’

• Humor diffuses tension. Werner von brown recalled that when astronaut John Glenn was strapped into his seat before take-off, dryly remarked, “Oh my god, I’m sitting on a pile of stuff created by the lowest cost bidder.”

• “When they’re laughing, they’re listening,” said Adrian Gostick, co-author of The Levity Effect.

Humor holds our attention:

- Making us popular as the most popular cat on Twitter has discovered.

- So we learn and remember as teacher-turned- monologist Taylor Mali discovered in performing the hilarious The The Impotence of Proofreading.

• Shared laughter keeps relationships fresh and interesting. “All emotional sharing builds strong and lasting relationship bonds, but sharing laughter and play adds joy, vitality, and resilience.”

•  The one thing “shared by mass murderers, felony drunk drivers, starving children, head banging caged laboratory animals, anxious overworked students, and most reptiles. They don’t play… What do most Nobel Laureates, historically renowned creative artists, successful multi-career entrepreneurs and animals of superior intelligence have in common? They are full of play throughout their lives,” wrote Stuart Brown.

So what actually makes us laugh?  Researchers have found just three clues: incongruity, superiority, and the pattern of three.  We do know that we who laugh last – why not laugh more together?

Last year VW launched “The Fun Theory” contest for best ideas to evoke better behavior in us. My favorite experiment, with more than a million views,  is “Piano Stairs.”

Does turning a set of subway stairs into a real-life piano encourage people to use them? Yes, 66% more.

My second favorite :  Does making a trash can sound like a 50 foot-deep well cause more people pick up their trash? Yes.

What a clever Me2We way to change others’ behavior – by making the new alternative more fun – and to attract avid followers to the contest.  Each new entry was a fresh media hook.

Another:  Will a pinball machine at a bus stop  (that involves  moving your feet) be sufficiently fun that you’ll be enticed to play it, thus getting exercise?

Other entries include Handwashing Art, One-armed Vending Machine, Bottle Bank Arcade, Container Disco, Gun Trash, Give and Change, Cheerleaders and The AAASHTRAY. (Enticing titles are vital). 

“The Speed Camera Lottery” won.

Seven takeaways for when you create your viral contest, sweeping your organization out into many conversations

1. Evoke Curiosity and an Upbeat Feeling

How smart of VW to inspire smiles and gain the “halo” for encouraging the creation of ideas that inspire “us” to make smarter choices.

2. Make a Relevant Connection to Your Brand

When you create your contest, with a theme that reinforces your brand personality (VW – simple, fun and reliable), make sure that the online design also embraces that image.  Note, for example the elegantly simple design of The Fun Theory’s contest site.  Reinforcing “reliable”, VW didn’t “just” spotlight the videos but included the backstory of how the experiment was created.

3. Make it Easy for Participants to Join the Conversation and Gain Bragging Rights

VW incorporated the use of FaceBook and YouTube – and a chance for fans to view, vote, comment and to share.

4. Visibly reward best entries with something they want.

5. Bring valuable allies closer by inviting them to be judges. 

6. Encourage applicants to seek votes. 

Applicants made the contest more sticky by asking for votes, showing people what they would do (create an Anywhere Organ) if they won a “grant.”

7. Don’t “Shout” Your Greatness, Let Fans Do it for You

Then there’s the classy, understated way VW sponsored the contest, by simply inserting their logo, not as an “ad” but as “An initiative of Volkswagen.”  By keeping the logo in the background, underwriting “an initiative” appointing a “jury” to judge, providing  - not “prizes” – but “grants” to winners the contest seems less like advertising and more like a service of VW. In so doing it may have polishes its halo in our minds, and so you can you, by adding your version of these elements to your contest.

 As Arnold Toynbee wrote, “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

Humor requires a target. If you make a bulls-eye out of someone weaker, particularly if you initiate the attack, you look like a bully.  Take aim, instead, at the powerful. Or, rather than getting upset, consider yourself lucky when someone makes you a target first.

Because, as Isaac Asimov observed, “For a humane person, the put-down is most satisfactory and most easily greeted with pleasurable laughter when the person being put down has done something to invite it – in other words, if he has attacked.  Then it is lunge-and-riposte and at the riposte we can laugh with a clear conscience.” 

Poke Fun at Yourself

When one makes oneself the butt of the joke one demonstrates unifying humor. Self-deprecating people build trust, get heard and get ahead. They look comfortable with themselves – an endearing quality. Here are six examples:

1. All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.

2. Sylvia’s mother gave this toast at her 60th birthday party: “Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.”

3.  Phyllis Diller said, “I know what got me into comedy… puberty!”

4.  Lily Tomlin, in her one-woman show, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe said “If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?”

5.  Numbers are not my strong suit. After I had added up a budget on a hand calculator and come up with three different totals, my business partner once quipped, “There are three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who can’t.”

6. “I had an IQ test. The results came back negative.” ~ Jake Torkelsen

Defuse Anxiety

“Those oxygen masks on airplanes? I don’t think there’s really any oxygen. I think they’re just to muffle the screams.” – Rita Rudner

Kid About a Common Situation

The next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it,” thought Frank Clark.  Hearing what’s funny in a group also enables one to instantly understand what isn’t safe to laugh at.  

When your humor highlights what we have in common, you and I feel more like “us.” Joking with co-workers builds bonds.

Women say they want someone who makes them laugh. Men want someone whom they can make laugh. 

The Harvard Business Review reported that executives with a sense of humor climb the corporate ladder more quickly and earn more money than their counterparts.”

“One hallmark of a great manager is a self-deprecating sense of humor,” according to a Half survey. Yet, we can take that finding with a grain of salt because people are much more likely to laugh at jokes made by their superiors than their inferiors, and in the presence of a person of high status, members of the same group will check whether the superior is laughing before laughing themselves. 

Sometimes (but not always), “if people are having fun, they’re going to work harder.”

Examples of unifying humor that tap into the universal “us” can pop up most anywhere:

• After the mad cow scare, a subscriber to my newsletter, mailed me this bumper sticker: “Montana – At least our cows are sane!”

• Commenting on the human condition: “God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day.”

• I saw this emblazoned on the tee shirt of a rotund man coming out of a San Diego beach shop: “The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.”

For stating the obvious, look at some newspaper headlines:

“Study Finds Sex, Pregnancy Link”  ~ Cornell Daily Sun

“Lack of Brains Hinders Research” ~ The Columbus Dispatch

Lily Tomlin said, “Nobody is here without a reason. … I like a huge range of comedy but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.”

For another humor-as-unifying experience, try a laughter yoga class.  “Laughter is not dissimilar to exercise,” explains professor Lee Berk. “It’s not going to cure someone of stage 3 cancer, but in terms of prevention it does make sense. In a sense, we have our own apothecary on our shoulders. Positive emotions such as laughter affect your biology.”

Evoke the Incongruous to Unite Others

A condemned spy was being led out at dawn in a pounding rain to be shot. As he and his guards stepped outside he spoke bitterly to them about the wet and cold, to which one guard replied, “What are you complaining about? We’ve got to march back.”

Dave Barry: “Never take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.”

Paul Klee: “A line is a dot that went for a walk.”

Understanding how to hit the funny bone isn’t easy, even with these tips and examples. As E.B. White famously noted, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. The procedure kills the essence of both the frog and the funny — and then what’s the point?” 

Then there are those who appear to have no humor whatsoever.  Usually that lack covers other concerns.  What effect do they have on others?  Read about it in the next post.

Yes, relationships seem dangerous or at least irritating at times.  And our choices often appear murky. Want a surprisingly quick and satisfying exercise for making wiser decisions next time? Try it by opening to any page in the witty new book by Dr. Mardy Grothe, I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like.  (Relationship Is Like a Shark is one of his chapter titles.) His previous gems are Never Let a Fool Kiss You or Let a Kiss Fool You, Oxymoronica and Viva la Repartee.

Share your own lyrics. Make them up right now at your computer.  It’s simple.  Honest.

Ask Humphrey or Gina to sing them for you. (They’re rather eccentric yet fun.) Then make your friends laugh, smile  … (or cry?) when they receive your singing telegram. Go ahead.  It’s free at kakomessenger.

 Sitting all by yourself in front of your computer too long?  Here’s another musical vacation you

can take right now. Hear Bill Withers sing Lean on Me – just for you. He’s waiting over at songza and at last.fm, along with a legion of other legendary musicians.

 After all, “music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life” or, uh, conjures up new ways of seeing the world.

• “Bank fees are like financial wedgies.”• “One of the founding fathers of rock and roll has left the building he helped construct.”• “Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.”Guess which of those colorful one-liners you’re most likely to remember – and repeat to others? Here’s hints for honing your quotability, but first a few more pithy examples.”Darlings, make blogs, not war.” That’s Adrianna Huffington’s 2007 acceptance speech at the Webby awards. Winners are limited to five words.Asked to write a six-word short story, Ernest Hemingway gave us, “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Recently, Wired asked sci-fi writers for stories. Life’s too short for long speeches, quickly forgotten, J.K. Rowling told Harvard. In a time-starved world, brevity becomes popular. Here’s some six-word autobiographies, from the conversation-starter of a book, Not Quite What I Was Planning:“Changing mind postponed demise by decades.“Asked to quiet down; spoke louder.”- Wendy Lee“Well, I thought it was funny.”- Stephen ColbertDan Pink asked for six-word memoirs for the career advisor, his comic hero, Johnny Bunko. Here’s two:”Life isn’t a multiple choice test.”"Followed the rules; wish I hadn’t.”Some of my favorite, brief classics: “No great thing is created suddenly” (Epictetus), “Love makes the world go round”, “You can’t direct the wind but you can adjust your sails.”Now, to be more frequently-quoted, here’s five tips, starting with brevity.1. Be brief“Bidding starts at 99 cents” announced Meg Whitman when accepting a Webby for eBay.Calvin Coolidge ( “Silent Cal”), was confronted by a woman at a White House dinner who exclaimed, “I bet my husband five dollars that I could get you to say more than three words.” He replied, “You lost.”Brevity forces you to choose your main point. The fewer the words the more clear and compelling your meaning can become. Skip the distracting underbrush of opening qualifiers and boring background. Offer your best upfront. Then, as Renée Zellweger’s character famously interrupted the courting Tom Cruise, (in the movie, Jerry Maguire) to say, “Shut up … just shut up. You had me at hello.”Yes, brevity can be tender or blunt, but never boring. “Silent Cal” – Calvin Coolidge, was confronted by a woman at a White House dinner who exclaimed, “I bet my husband five dollars that I could get you to say more than three words.” He replied, “You lost.”2. Get specificSpecificity demonstrates accountability and thus create credibility. Which statement would you remember?• We put our members first.• For your convenience, we’re staying open on Saturdays.The specific detail proves a general conclusion, not the reverse.3. Provide mental pictures from the physical world.“I still make coffee for two.”- Zak NelsonIf you knew nothing about either company, it is likely that you’d find Apple easier to recall than Intel, for example.In descending order of memorability, notice this:• blue• ocean blue• Mediterranean blue4. Make unexpected comparisonsBank fees are like financial wedgies.5. Evoke humorAccepting his 2007 Webby award, Al Gore said, “Please don’t recount this vote.”Use Brevity to Make Life More Meaningful and Memorable, Two Tips1. Start a one-sentence diary, as Gretchen Rubin suggests. No matter how overwhelmed you get, you can take the time to capture a moment. Akin to noticing more when you carry a camera on an outing, knowing you will be writing about “my day” makes you more present during it. Less chance, perhaps, that your days will be forgotten, carved in sand.2. From billboards to retorts and headlines, notice the one-liners that stick in your mind, as you go about your day. Why did you remember them? Probably for one or both of these reasons:• Innately vivid, perhaps evoking one of the five elements above.• Relates to something that matters to you, either an upsetting or uplifting.Through this exercise you’ll become aware of the power inherent in vivid brevity – and what’s on your mind as certain messages you see stick out.For more ideas on becoming top-of-mind, drop in and say hello at the international conference of IABC where I am speaking this month.

What animal was voted the funniest? See answer below.

“A rather distracted mother was walking with her precocious son past the lion enclosure at the zoo when he suddenly asked: ‘Mum, how do lions make love?’ Without thinking she replied: ‘I don’t know darling, most of your father’s friends are in Rotary.’” It is easier to laugh than to evoke laughter, we know. So Ben Leung decided to do his PhD study on the connection between our personality, social adjustment and humor.

Among other findings he discovered that, “Jokes that have an aggressive element tend to be appreciated more by men. Jokes with very strong aggression are not appreciated by women. But if the joke has a double-meaning, both men and women are likely to find it funny.”

Within half a second brains respond to something potentially funny. People with heart disease are 40 per cent less likely to laugh at funny situations. Not surprising, since we know that laughter reduces stress and boosts immune systems. Yet side-splitting humor remains poorly understood. So, in 2001, British scientist, Dr. Richard Wiseman, launched the global LaughLab. He asked people around the world to submit jokes and rate those that were on the site. The project attracted more than 40,000 jokes, with 350,000 people from 70 countries rating them.
Here’s the funniest joke – back then

The funniest animal by vote at LaughLab? The duck.

Wiseman also found that all jokes had at least one of these four themes:
1. Someone trying to look clever and taking a pratfall.
2. Husbands and wives not being loving.
3. Doctors being insensitive about imminent death.
4. God making a mistake.

Another finding: People from Britian, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand expressed a strong preference for jokes involving word plays:

Patient: “Doctor, I’ve got a strawberry stuck up my bum.”
Doctor: “I’ve got some cream for that.”

But Canadians and Americans preferred gags involving a sense of superiority – either because a person looked stupid or was made to look stupid by someone else:

Texan: “Where are you from?”
Harvard graduate: “I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.”
Texan: “Okay – where are you from, jackass?”

So, how hard is it to get others to laugh? Mysteriously difficult, according to scientists and professional comedians. In fact, it is easier to get others to cry or smile than to laugh. While you need to evoke a response in only one part of the brain for the first two, you must stimulate a more complex “laughter circuit” involving many more parts of the brain for laughter to happen.

When we attempt to understand puns, we process them in left side of the brain, several researchers discovered, including John Allen Paulos, author of Mathematics and Humor. Yet more complex, non-wordplay jokes are sent to the right side of the brain, triggering many more parts of the brain along the way.

The left side of the brain is a highly efficient, narrowly programmed linguistic computer. Alternatively, to laugh at a humorous silent film, the right hemisphere of the brain is activated. Perhaps that’s why comedians often use their body and props to silently act out a part of their story—to activate more parts of your mind.

From researchers, here’s three clues to what makes us laugh: incongruity, superiority and the pattern of three.

1. Incongruity.

A joke, “I went to my doctor for shingles. He sold me aluminum siding.”
When we see or hear something incongruous, we are surprised into laughter, often as a sort of relief. This may be a primitive response for indicating a “false alarm”, telling neighbors in ancient times that an apparent danger is, in fact, nothing to fear. V.S. Ramachandran, in Phantoms in the Brain, wrote, “The main purpose of laughter might be to allow the individual to alert others in the social group that the detected anomaly is nothing to worry about.”

2. Superiority.

Those who tell us funny stories about their own foibles—or those of others—help listeners feel momentarily superior to the jokester or to the people who’ve been made the butt of the joke.

3. The Pattern of Three

“My favorite books are Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, and Rock Hard Abs in 30 days.”

Comedians have long believed that jokes work best in a pattern of three parts. Offer two straightforward examples, then a third one to shatter the pattern.

My friend, Ben Casnocha’s recent wiki and post on humor inspired this post. It reminded me of the power of laughter to bring friends closer and to lift those in conflict off their hardened positions and more open to connecting.

“Go slow to go fast” I remind myself (too late) as did this other Scandanavian. See what’s already made a half million people laugh. Then see my favorite second, third and fourth “go slow to go fast lessons” from around the world, right here at tbs’s very funny ads. Sometimes one can’t run fast enough. Be kind to all, as who knows what’s happened just before you met each person or what he fears or how things may turn out? Ah, art in ads. Now, back to work.