A few years ago, I did a study on stand up comedians. This became the basis of one of my main developments which became known as the ‘laughter filter’. One of the things that I wanted to discuss this month is some skills for dramatically improving your ability to use humour.

It’s funny but some people ask me why there is a joke section in the newsletter. The joke section is there not because I just want to make people laugh. Often the jokes are ridiculously bad. The reason why it is there is that it gets people to pay attention to ambiguities. John La Valle talks about ambiguities being the basis of humour. Whenever you become aware of a word having more than one meaning your brain processes it in more than one way. This allows you to make more connections in your brain which improves the efficiency of your brain.

So, literally, paying attention to ambiguities, noticing them, spotting them, being aware of them allows you to improve your brain power and increase the speed with which you think. Also, by writing down ambiguities, you’ll find that your brain will start to find double meanings a lot more and the world will become a hilarious place to exist in. In these two jokes we can see how ambiguity is involved in the double meaning of the word or words bolded out.

A horse walks into a bar, the barman says ‘Why the long face?’

A man walks into a bar. Bangs his head.

As well as ambiguities, there is an important skill most good comedians use of exaggeration. This involves taking a description of something and exaggerating certain parts of it till it becomes ridiculous or offers a new way of thinking about the situation. Also the more exaggerated a story is, the more vivid an experience the story teller creates and the more they engage the audience.

Have you ever noticed that it’s always the days that you need to get things done that the bank lines seem to just grow. It’s like every second decides the last two weeks an every single old lady on the planet has decided that day to count their penny collections.

Usually the comedian will take something which most people experience or think of and over exaggerate it bringing it into the absurd. Also exaggeration can be useful with sarcasm. You can take a belief or law or rule which is unnecessary or ridiculous and by taking it to it’s extreme while sarcastically agreeing with it, you can comically argue against the point.

Yeah, I believe it is a good idea to bomb Iraq. Sure they mightn’t have threatened anyone else per say but they might have done it in the future. In fact, personally I think we should begin to clean up some of the other countries too. You never know who is going to attack us next so why not one by one just go to each country and bomb them. Since we don’t know who is a danger, if we cover all angles and bomb every country we have to get it right at least some of the time. At on the off chance that it doesn’t work then we can always try bombing ourselves as we might have enemies lurking within.

Another skill is something known in NLP terms called Selectional Restrictional Violations (SRV’s). This is when you give animate qualities to inanimate objects or when you ascribe qualities to something which aren’t normally possessed by it. The thought of an animal thinking like a human or a human behaving like an animal can be quite humorous.

I always wonder about cats. It’s like at least dogs make an effort. Cats really have this ‘playing hard to get’ thing down. They don’t seem to care at all. They just wander about and it’s like the world was made for them. You can’t imagine a cat with poor self esteem issues. They all seem so arrogant, don’t they? Arrogant and self absorbed. Well that is what you get when your only vocabulary is ‘Me How’. You never see a cat with their head down drooping and looking all depressed. They would be fantastic at the text messages. You can just imagine it, can’t you?

To improve your ability to use humour, it’s a good idea to practise these different skills and create different humorous stories or jokes. When you can look at the world more humorously, you’ll find it possible to help other people laugh at it more too and you’ll find that you’ll be living a far happier and more enjoyable life.