 Welcome to my lecture on the many benefits of humor. We can't possibly treat this topic exhaustively, there's just too much. But I hope you get a flavor of it and enjoy yourself while you're at it. It has been said that the surest way to make a joke not funny is to study it. You take humor and you apply serious research methods to it and you pretty much have a serious, non-funny lecture. That may be the case here. But the point is that if you're looking at the benefits of humor, what you really want is not a bunch of people sitting around saying, hey, I like humor because what you want is to look at scholars in various fields who've studied humor and who found benefits in their research. So yes, there is such a thing as humor studies. Humor itself is even a science by today's definition of science. And humor scholarship can be found in so many different areas. And we'll see examples in this lecture. Scholars who study business, the workplace, human resources, education, politics, medicine, healing, psychology, sociology, all of those areas are fair game for humor study. And we're going to see some examples of lots of different areas coming up. Humor is a bonding device. It has been shown to reduce distance between the teller and the listener. That's very important in the workplace, whether it's between a superior or subordinate or people who are at the same level, people who are in the same team. And research has shown that in the workplace, humor can boost employee morale, even lead to improved productivity, which is always important, facilitate communication. Admittedly, sometimes humor can get in the way of communication if something is misstated. And if humor is used in the wrong way, we will actually look in a later lecture at the topic of toxic humor in the workplace and how that comes about and what we can do about it. Humor has been shown to help build relationships, a bonding device, facilitate cohesiveness of a group belonging, for sure, help build relationships. This sounds like it might be repetitive, but I'm not changing it at this point. And of course, enhanced organizational culture, since with humor, we're establishing bonds and a sense of group belonging, and so it can only help organizational culture as opposed to splitting people apart. Now, an example of an area that was studied, one of the more interesting examples, I think, is some researchers studied humor amongst sex workers and found that prostitutes used humor as a way to bond, and not only that, but to cope with the difficulties in their workplace, reduced stress. What they would do is they would mock their clients, obviously not when the clients were around, and share stories. Isn't that nice to know? Yeah, let's all stay away from prostitutes. But it's very interesting when you think about it as one of the more interesting studies, because in that kind of a situation, if humor can help reduce stress among female sex workers, well, how much can it help in other kinds of stressful professions like professors who have to speak clearly when they do their lectures on YouTube. Yes, let's think about that for a minute. Humor and education is an obvious fit. In fact, research has shown that humor decreases students' anxiety, helps them perform on a test if their anxiety is reduced, improves the ability to learn and remember what you have learned if something is presented in a humorous context, you remember it better. It can boost students' self-esteem. It can bring the student closer to the teacher, remember this notion of reducing distance between the teller and the listener, and naturally encourage a more receptive learning atmosphere for the same reasons. And it's interesting to note that humor in the classroom, quote-unquote, goes back to ancient times. In the time of the Talmudic sages about 1700 years ago, Raba, a very, very famous Talmudic sage, would always say something humorous before he started his class, which is something a lot of teachers still do today. Politicians are known to do that. You start with a joke. And people are more receptive. They laugh, and then he would begin his lecture and the audience would be more engaged. Another Talmudic sage, Raba, a mayor, was an expert in fox fables, kind of like Esop's fables. And fully one-third of his lectures were devoted to parables. Presumably the parables were related to the topic of the lecture, I guess similar to my YouTube videos in this course. And they were also, they would help engagement because they were humorous and relevant. So it's interesting to note that humor has been used in education since ancient times and not only secular education, but even in religious instruction. One of the modalities by which this sort of humor and any humor in the classroom works is no doubt by reducing the distance between the teacher and the students. You establish a bond. You establish a relationship when you use humor. I'll say it over here in the slide, but in particular, self-deprecating humor happens to do that. A warm human relationship, we look at the instructor more as a human being instead of somebody, hopefully, that we should get around and get one over on, let's say that. And that's a very nice quote, Victor Borgia, the Danish comedian. If you haven't seen anything of his, look him up. Laughter is the shortest distance between two people. Very funny guy. One study that was interesting to me because, you know, Seinfeld, students were shown an episode of Seinfeld before they had to do a stressful project. But what that was is they had to give an impromptu speech in front of a camera, which is stressful. Students who had not watched the Seinfeld episode, their heart rates, the heart beats rose to 100 on the average, 100. And the ones who had, they only rose to 80 to 85 beats per minute. So if you reduce anxiety, if you use humor to reduce anxiety, reduce stress, the result is that the students are better able to cope with what they have to do for class. Advertising is one field which needed no help in understanding the value of humor. They were putting humor in their ads before researchers were studying what it did. But the fact of the matter is that there has been a lot of humor and a lot of the study of humor in advertising. Just a couple of examples. One study analyzed over 1,000 television commercials on 150 different elements and found a very high correlation between humor and recall. That was the highest correlation that they found in that whole study and all the 150 elements with each other. So people are, and as a person who views commercials, I'm sure you agree with that. You're much more likely to remember a commercial that you've seen if there was humor involved. And there you go. Another study corroborated. 17% more viewers remembered a commercial if it was humorous as opposed to the typical commercial. I don't know if you even remember the humorous milk campaign by the milk industry, but yes, it definitely was remembered by people because it was humorous. In the next slide, we'll see a commercial from Israel for the Israeli television provider. Yes, which uses many of the devices we studied in the previous lecture on the different types of humor. And it's a parody of the Village People song, the YMCA. And I'm telling you all this now because I'm having a little trouble getting my narration and the YouTube audio to work together on the same slide. So we're going to the next one now and we'll take a look at it. For now, I'm not including videos to play in my lectures. There are a few issues related to that. So this might be a good time for you to pause and click on the link and view the video on your own. Medicine and the healing professions. It's another area where there's a lot of research. I think I'm have more examples here than actual sources, which but you can find it all over the place. Even the expression laughter is the best medicine shows you how important humor is to medicine and healing. For one thing, yes, there is such a thing as a medical clown. There are schools that you can go to to become a medical clown. It's an actual profession. That's how important humor is to medicine. Hospitals employ them. And I know anyone watching this video now and listening to my voice is probably scrambling to write down, look up schools for medical clowns because I'm changing my career. Who wouldn't want to be a medical clown? That's amazing. Two very well known examples. Norman Cousins wrote a book decades ago about how he coped with and eventually came out of extremely painful disease. He made sure that he watched several minutes a day of funny television shows that provoked very strong laughter in him. It had to be very funny shows. And the actor Christopher Reeve, who was in the early Superman movies, after a riding accident, he was paralyzed from the neck down, very morose. He was very upset. He was contemplating suicide. This is his initial hospitalization. All of a sudden, a doctor comes in in a white coat and a mask and talking a mile a minute in a heavy Russian accent. And he says he's going to cure him. He's a proctologist and he's going to examine him right now. He's going to do a practical logical exam. And when obviously pretty quickly, while Christopher Reeve was a little bit panicky, the doctor revealed himself as Robin Williams, who was a friend of his. And when Christopher Reeve in his book that he wrote about his experiences, I refer to this anecdote to this time period. He said that was the first time he laughed and the laughter gave him hope and changed his life. Specifically cancer patients and chemotherapy patients and especially younger people, teenage chemotherapy patients have their own support groups, websites that help them out. But in particular, there are some support groups and websites that are devoted to humor, the humor of being a cancer patient, believe it or not. One example is I don't have to worry about my shampoo anymore because my hair fell out from chemotherapy and that's a little piece of humor. You might think it's tragic humor and possibly it is, but it's a way of coping. If you just do a little Google search on this, I'm sure you'll come up with a lot of examples on your own. So I'm not going to belabor the point except to say that I had a student years ago who was at Baruch and going through chemo while she was still continuing in college. She's coming through to the vertical campus building in the days when they still allowed smoking right outside the doors instead of the situation well before COVID where you were not allowed to smoke right outside the doors. So she passed a friend of hers, a classmate, who offered her a cigarette and she said, no thanks, I already have cancer. Similarly, there's a huge body of humor by and for disabled people. Again, I'm not going to look at it. You can find a lot of it on your and I have a friend who's writing a book, an entire book on humor related to disabilities, by and for disabled people. This little image here is adorable. Disabilities Awareness Training. It reminds me of something that could have occurred, could have appeared in an episode of the television show, The Office, but it didn't, but it could have. We've already seen that humor can reduce anxiety in students and basically overall in anyone, in any situation, humor relaxes people, reduces anxiety, reduces tension. It's basically a stress buster. So when necessary, humor can definitely act as a stress buster. It can be used in relationships. It can be used in education. And believe it or not, it can be used in getting even and we'll see one or two examples now, but we'll look at this much more in a later lecture on social justice humor and how humor can be used in the service of social justice. An example of humor being used as a stress buster and an educational tool. Great comic. Once again, I'm going to ask you to pause this slideshow, depending on how you're viewing it and click on the link. You'll be going to YouTube to watch this very funny brief bit. Some examples of getting even humor. And I'm sure you have more to contribute on your own. It's going from bottom to top. You're one of the required viewings in this course is the movie The Producers by Mel Brooks goes back to 1967. Mel Brooks said that his movie The Producers was a way of getting even with Hitler. He said it's straight out. Of course, it's impossible to really get even with Hitler. But he felt that by using comedy to mock you rob Hitler of his power and any possibility of building myths around him. This was this is his words and I'm very happy to have it because it matches the kinds of things we're talking about in this class. How about women getting even for sexist treatment by men? Woman needs a brain transplant. The doctor tells her well, a man's brain costs $800,000 a woman's brain only costs $100,000. Naturally, she gets offended and asks why the doctor says that's because women's brains have been used. They're marked down. That's a targeted, targeted joke not at women, but at men finally. And then Tory and Hughes, very, very good stuff. If you're black in America, you're relatively well spoken, well dressed, well educated. Sooner or later, you can count on one of your white contemporaries with the very best of intentions turning to you and saying something like, You're so cool. Sometimes I actually have trouble remembering your black, you know, like that. That's a compliment. No, I mean that sometimes I really forget your black. Yeah, well, let me marry your sister. I'm sure it'll pop right back into your mind. Getting even humor. Another wonderful example of getting even humor. I'm hoping you're going to pause the slideshow and go to that link and hear him tell it on his own. Very, very frenetic delivery. And there's nothing like hearing as opposed to reading it. So that's it for me. You should definitely look at that on your own irony and satire at the time of that I'm recording this lecture, September 2020. This was passed around quite a bit on Facebook. An image from a news source, residents of a quiet Rhineland city awoke Monday to discover what was defaced. A Nazi resting place was defaced with images of the Jewish star, six pointed star, the word Israel, the word chosen people. And it's a lot of people thought this was true news, real news. But the source was actually the onion and anything that comes from the onion, as you know, is simply humor. And this was clearly a take off on the Jewish cemeteries that have been defaced with Nazi images. Do this on your own. That's just a picture of a web page. Go to the link to a page which is titled laughter is the best medicine. And they list lots and lots of benefits of humor, you know, many more than what we have discussed here in this lecture today.