Developing the Laughter Filter
 
Imagine one simple secret that could help you deal with any situation in life more resourcefully and effectively than ever before. Well it comes from humour. You think I’m joking? Don’t make me laugh.

When I modelled Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard a few years ago, one of the things I became fascinated with as I watched many other comedians, was the ability they had to turn ordinary experiences into hilarious laughter. I realised what great performers actually do. In a nutshell, Great performers take the ordinary and make it extraordinary.

Most comedians I watched had, what I called a ‘Laughter Filter’. A ‘Laughter Filter’ turns ANY experience you are having at any given moment in time into a humourous incident. The art is when you are going through a situation in which you would have felt angry or stressed or disappointed or frustrated to ASK YOURSELF “How would I tell this story as a stand up comic?”

This one simple question has produced MASSIVE CHANGES to my experience of life. Now, what kind of things are useful to bare in mind when you think about doing stand up comedy. Firstly, lots of stand up works on EXAGGERATION. Take whatever situation you are in and exaggerate some aspect of it.

For incidence, imagine if you are waiting in a queue at a bank and getting impatient. You might use this as a parody for how slow they are. It is almost like they were doing it on purpose. You could imagine a situation in which they wouldn’t or couldn’t be slow and imagine them being slow anyway (for example, as firemen and women in a burning building). It’s in changing the context of some behaviour and exaggerating it, we find humour apparent.

Another suggestion, think about the situation in relation to how aliens would react to it. For example, consider the disappointment from not going up and talking to a person you would have liked to.. (oh, I should have asked him that question; god, why didn’t I ask her out?). Now, what would aliens say if they came down and saw your goal was to chat to the other person and your strategy was to go inside your head and imagine them rejecting you. It’s the hilariousness of looking at the ridiculousness of our behaviour as human beings sometimes that can change the way we feel about it.

One more example, take a situation in which you have gotten angry. Now, some of the best skills comedians have, are their ability to take situations that make them angry and describe them comically. Through using sarcasm you can take situations that make you feel pissed off and turn it into an event that is hilarious. Consider your boss or a customer screaming abuse at you for some unfair reason. Imagining how you would relive the experience in a sarcastic way. For example, imagine taking their abuse and going over the top apologising like you apoligised really sarcastically as if you said how so, so, so sorry you were, crying like a little school girl… the more over the top you go and the more ridiculous you make it, the more the event makes you laugh. This way you get to control how you represent the experience and it turns from aggrivating to liberating…

So, these are some clues of how to use the ‘LAUGHTER FILTER’ to turn your problems into jokes. As Richard (Bandler) says “People often say one day I’ll look back at this and laugh, I always ask: WHY WAIT??”