George Gilbert’s Motivational Humor

Comedians used to tell me that in order for something to be funny there had to be an element of truth in the joke. You have to make the joke believable. Jack Benny once said, “The trick in playing comedy is to make an audience believe what is going on and for this you have to believe it first yourself. This is why a comedian is basically an actor. The art of comedy is like the art of acting–except that in comedy, the actor has to be able to believe the most preposterous and exaggerated things.”

When inserting a joke into your presenation you must make it believable or at least relevant.

If a new employee can laugh with the group it will bring them closer together and get them working as a team. Humor should be inclusive not exclusive. When my parents first joined Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In Tour everyone was professional and very nice but my parents didn’t really feel a part of the team until the time the bus drove up to the Westbury Music Theater on Long Island, New York. It was a dreary and rainy day. The parking lot was dirty. I was six years old and I looked out the window and said, “This is beautiful downtown Burbank?” Since this was a running joke on the television show, everyone laughed hysterically and that brought us all together as a team.

My parents toured military hospitals overseas During World War II and Walter Reed hospital during Vietnam. This was not an easy thing to do. It wasn’t easy being up, smiling, and trying to make wounded soldiers laugh. There were many acts that couldn’t do it, it was too depressing, but they realized that was the least they could do for the soldiers who risked there lives defending our country.

Comedian Phyllis Diller once told a story about the first time she went with Bob Hope to a military hospital. She said she started to cry and Bob Hope took her aside and said to her that she wasn’t there for that and she had to be strong for them.

In Jack Benny’s auto-biography, “Sunday Nights at Seven” he describes a situation when a wounded soldier went into an epileptic fit while he was playing the violin in his act. “I knew I had to say something to break the tension in that room. ‘Well,’ I ventured, ‘Here’s a guy who got sick only when I started to play the fiddle. Let me tell you fellows - This happens frequently when I play the violin to people who aren’t in the hospital.’ Everybody laughed. The tension was broken. Even the men who had been watching with grim faces during the monologue broke up and roared with laughter. The psychiatrist on the ward told me that that one joke was the equivalent of six months of psychotherapy.”

John Steinbeck describe it best in an article he wrote in the New York Herald.

“…Bob Hope and his company must come into this quiet, inward, lonesome place, and gently pull the minds outward and catch the interest, and finally bring laughter up out of the black water. There is a job. It hurts many of the men to laugh, hurts knitting bones, strains at sutured incisiions, and yet the laughter is a great medicine….”

“Perhaps as important as anything. I learned a lot about humor, a lot about laughter.” George H. W. Bush on Ronald Reagan at his funeral.

We can all learn a very important lesson on how to use humor in our presentations from former President Ronald Reagan. Reagan earned the title of “the Great Communicator” because he was able to use humor to diffuse very tough situations.

When President Reagan was running for his second term as president he participated in a series of debates with former Vice-President Walter Mondale. Mondale was trying to make age a big issue in the campaign. When Reagan was questioned during the debate about age, he replied, “I want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” From that moment on age was no longer an issue in the 1984 presidential campiagn.

President Reagan was a master of using humor in his presentations. Remember, a little appropriate humor can help you diffuse a situation when you are giving a presentation.

“The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.” - G. K. Chesterton

My parents were in show-business for more than thirty years. One of the secrets to their longevity was that they had a rule that they lived by. They never discussed what happened on stage immediately after the show. They would wait untill the next day before they discussed what went wrong. They understood that talking about a mistake backstage while they were full of adrenalin from the performance wasn’t in their best interest. This gave them a cool-down period so when they did talk about the previous night’s show they could be more objective about it. They also realized that many of the mistakes weren’t very serious and many times funny. They were now able to laugh about something rather than argue about it. Many of the mistakes got a laugh and so they would put them into the routine making the act even funnier. If they had discussed those mistakes immediately after they would not have been so objective. They might have blamed each other for the mistakes and therefore neither the act nor the marriage would have lasted. Many acts broke up because they were fighting about the performance as soon as they walked off stage.

Next time a mistake occurs at work, if at all possible, don’t discuss it immediately while tempers flare. Take a cooling off period so that you can discuss the incident rather than argue about it.

There are times when humor and laughter are not appropriate, but there are times that even though it may not seem appropriate, humor and laughter are a necessity. For instance, some might say that humor and laughter are inappropriate at a funeral or when a loved one passes away. But laughter may actually help us cope with the loss.

Several years ago I attended the funeral of a close family friend. She and her husband were in show-business and they often worked, toured, and vacationed together with my parents. So when she passed away it was a sad time for all. We not only lost a friend but part of our extended family. At the funeral several family members and friends stood up to give eulogies. They talked about how sad this was and how terrible cancer is. Then Morey Amsterdam, from the old Dick Van Dyke Show, spoke. He started telling humorous stories about her and jokes. Soon those tears of sorrow became tears of laughter.

Was it inappropriate to share humor and laughter at the funeral? NO! I think Morey made us realize that day that it is more important to remember the good times, the laughter, and the humor of the deceased than to focus on death and disease.

When determining what kind of humor to use in your presentation you have to take into consideration two things. Will the audience think it’s funny and do you think it’s funny? I know this sound silly, but sometimes speakers use a joke because someone told them that it was funny. When I was first starting out as a stand-up comedian old comedians would want to help me out by giving me jokes that they used to do. I would try them out, but I knew they wouldn’t get a laugh becuase I didn’t think the joke fit me. It may have worked twenty years ago, but it was passe and didn’t fit my personality. The jokes didn’t go over well. If you don’t think its funny the audience isn’t going to think its funny.

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Sometimes people will tell me “that’s not positive thinking” when I am being realistic.  I think that those who use positive thinking and aren’t realistic are in denial. I am a very positive thinker, but I don’t like to fool myself into thinking that something will be alright? when I know that if I don’t do something about it there is no chance of it (what ever it is) will be alright. I recently did a presentation on the difference between dreams and Goals. I said that a dream is something you want like a goal, but the difference is a dream is something that you talk about but never do much about it until one day you wake up and realize the dream is over. A goal is something that you want, but unlike a deam you do more than talking about it. You plan, you follow through on those plans, and you make adjustments until you attain that goal. Both involve positive thinking, but with a dream there is no follow through. Also, a goal must be realistic. If your goal is to sing on American idol and you have never sung in public and don’t know how, then before setting that goal you would need to know if you can sing on key. I would set smaller goals along with the big goal. Take singing lessons. Learn to sing on key, develop your voice, even dance lessons to learn to move, start singing in front of audiences so that when you went to audition for American Idol you not only knew how to sing, but could overcome the stage fright of auditioning in front of the judges.

When I decided to switch from Stand-up comedy to Motivational Humorist, I didn’t just announce to the world one day that I am now a professional speaker. I started completely over. I decided to not use my old material from my stand-up comedy days instead I completely scrapped the act. I joined toastmasters to make sure I learned the basic difference of speaking as opposed to just stand-up comedy. I started developing material with speaking in mind. I started entering speech contests to put more pressure on me as a speaker. I attained some lofty goals in the Toastmaster Organization reaching the pinnacle for a Toastmaster who wanted to speak professionally “Accredited speaker” I used positive thinking, but I had a plan to go with it. Where many positive thinkers go wrong is that they think positively about becoming something, but they don’t engage in an action plan that will get them to the manifestation of that positive thought.

Positive thinkers become pessimists at the first sign of trouble because they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t set realistic goals for themselves and failed on such a large scale that they gave up and never tried again. On the other side of it those that set more realistic goals and continue to conquer them not only stay more focused, but because they were more realistic they learned from their mistakes to better themselves to achieve the next time.

When I talk about how to put humor in presentations, I tell audiences what the single most important lessons the old comedians would teach me backstage on the shows that my parents were performing. “before you can be good you have to be bad”  the old time comedians new something about perseverance. “before you can be good you have to be bad”  That doesn’t sound like a positive thinker. In fact, if a positive thinker in denial heard that they would consider that to be a negative statement. Why cant you be good from the beginning they might say. The old comedians new that to really achieve greatness you had to learn from your mistakes and perfect your craft. They knew how to respond when the joke wasn’t working.  Why? Because they would break their in their jokes and routines at smaller theaters so when they played the “Palace” in New York or any other top theater they would succeed.

The late Johnny Carson was the master of failing. When a joke didn’t get a laugh, Johnny didn’t miss a beat. His come backs would get more laughs than many comedians would get with their best material. Why? He continually worked hard at his craft and didn’t panic and learned not to give up. This is something that comes with experience. Johhny probably failed many times on shows starting out, but that’s where he learned his craft.

A positive thinker who is in denial fails because they didn’t plan how to over come the challenges when presented. A positive thinker who is realistic succeeds because the learn from their mistakes and improve upon them to continue on their quest to reach their goals.

After speaking to Axicon World Imports from Canada they wrote me and said they were going to make “laughter a part of our job description.” What a great idea, humor and laughter as part of a company’s job description

More and more companies are incorporating humor into the work place, companies such as Southwest Airlines, AT&T, General Electric and even the IRS. Lets face it, if the IRS can incorporate humor into the work place then any company can incorporate humor. But why are these companies using humor? To motivate their employees.

Harvey Mackay once said in an interview in Success Magazine that fun was the most important thing to keep his employees motivated. He said, “We manufacture fun, and there are a gazillion laughs around the plant all the time.” Good advice from a man who runs Mackay Envelopes Corp., a company with 550 employees, that makes 20 million envelopes a day, and has sales of $85 Million a year.