George Gilbert’s Motivational Humor

With the exception of the 15th, April is my favorite month. Two very important things in my life take place in April. It’s National Humor Month and National Donate Life Month. Both of these causes play a very significant role in my life. As a motivational humorist I not only speak on the importance and benefits of humor in our lives, but since my  ex-wife Dori’s kidney/pancreas transplant, I often speak to inspire organ and tissue donation. To medical personnel in that field I speak from the patient’s point of view and how we used humor to deal with such a serious illness. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could combine the two! For instance, if a person is lacking a sense of humor, we could give that person a transplant of a funny bone or a humorous.
 

If it weren’t for her kidney/pancreas transplant Dori would probably not be here today or at least not enjoy the quality of life she enjoys today. Needing and waiting for a transplant can be a very traumatic and painful experience, but humor helped to alleviate some of that trauma and stress. This does not mean we didn’t have our pity parties but laughter kept those pity parties from developing into a major depression.
 

Not long after the transplant, while she was still in the hospital, I knew healthwise Dori was feeling better because she started to worry about her looks instead of her health. I came into her hospital room one morning and she was looking in the mirror. “I look terrible,” she said, “I have all these staples down my front.” I joked, “You look beautiful! Just like a Playboy Centerfold, and even they have staples down the front.” A little bit of humor can ease the mental anguish of dealing with a serious illness or situation. Laughter can put a different perspective on a stressful situation.

When using humor in a speech the goal is to make the humor enhance the presentation and not detract. I recently saw a speaker trying too hard to be funny. He was injecting humor just for the sake of being funny and not trying to fit it to the subject. It was as if he wrote the jokes and then wrote the speech as an afterthought. Some of the humor was about people in the audience and I felt uncomfortable because it was embarrassing for those members in the audience to be singled out. This wasn’t a roast or a comedy club.

A fool and his money are soon parted - Especially in Las Vegas   Tulara Lee 

 April 1.  This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894April fool, n.  The March fool with another month added to his folly.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Mirth is God’s medicine.  Everybody ought to bathe in it.  ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Thank you for all the email, cards and good wishes in response to mom’s condition. On February 8 my mother Humorist Tulara Lee had a Lobe Ectomy to remove her upper left lung due to cancer. Like Dana Reeve mom never smoked. She is expected to make a full recovery.

Along with your thoughts and prayers laughter helped us get through her surgery and recovery. Using laughter therapy immediately before surgery put mom at ease in such a stressful situation. We were telling jokes and laughing right up until the time the surgical staff wheeled her into the operating room.

I broke out into an adlib stand-up monologue about doctors nurses and hospitals. Making up jokes on anything I could to put us both at ease. I said, “the reason they give you those gowns that open in the back is because even Doctors need a laugh.” Much of the humor we can’t remember now because I was making it up as we went along, but I know that if I tried to do it on stage I wouldn’t get a laugh, but at the time it was funny and somewhat appropriate.

Even the doctor bought into the humor. He also joked with us about the surgery. The doctor asked mom a question. And Mom responded by saying to the doctor, “you’re the expert.” And the doctor said, “No I’ve never done this before, but I have a how to book. May be you could hold it for me while I’m operating on you.”  Making us laugh.

After the surgery she was in intensive care for awhile but that didn’t stop us from finding humor and laughter in the recovery. I joked that, “some humor is dead pan while hers is bed pan.”  When it came time to remove a tube mom asked the doctor, “will it hurt?” the doctor responded by saying, “I have been doing this for over thirty years and it hasn’t hurt me yet.”

After leaving the hospital it was important to keep our spirits up by watching humorous videos and DVD’s while she was recuperating. She watched reruns of television show like “Everybody Loves Raymond” the old “Flip Wilson” comedy show, “Andy Griffith Show.” Shows that make her laugh.

I found myself handling the big things, but stressing over small unimportant things and had to remember to practice what I preach. One night I wasn’t in the best of moods, while channel surfing I came across a two-hour version of “Americas Funniest Home Video’s” I very seldom watch that show, but on this occasion it was just what the doctor ordered. The videos made me laugh out loud for most of the two hours and it was very cathartic.

Today mom is still recovering and is getting stronger every day. She is getting ready to join me on the speaking circuit again and looks forward to speaking with me in April. Laughter helped get us through her surgery

It is important to find humor while going through something as physically and emotionally challenging as surgery. Norman Cousins said: “Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions”

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.

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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Don’t talk too fast. The audience needs time to process what you are saying. This is especially true when delivering a humorous speech. Not only does the audience need to process the information but they also need to process the humor. The audience will not laugh if they are too busy trying to understand what you are saying. This doesn’t mean to talk so slow that you sound like you are talking down to the audience. It just means that you should speak at a natural conversational rate so the audience can pick up the nuances of the humor. Also, when you speak too fast it can give the audience the impression that you are nervous and want to get through your speech and off the stage as fast as you can.

Have you ever seen someone perform and said, “I can do that!”? Sometimes we say that when a performance is so bad (like some of the American Idol auditions) you think you can do better and probably can, but sometimes someone performs so well and they make it look so easy that we say, “I can do that!” But in reality we cant. Some of the great comedians didn’t get the credit they deserved because they made it look easy.

Most people don’t credit the Three Stooges for their talent. It was just silly slapstick humor. Three people always beating themselves up. I guarantee you, if you or I tried that we would kill ourselves. The Three Stooges worked very hard to make it look easy. Many of the routines you saw in the movies they had been doing for years on the vaudeville stage. Even though they had done them over and over they continued to rehearse them to make it look natural and unrehearsed. According to the book “Mixed Nuts” by Lawrence J. Epstein:

The stooges loved to ad-lib, and they were good at it. They had mastered their own characters so well that they knew when a scripted line sounded false or wasn’t funny enough. But they still took preparation seriously. Thought their career, the Three Stooges believed in rehearsal. Like an Abbott and Costello verbal routine, they physical movements of the Stooges required each to know exactly what the other was going to be doing at any given moment.
 

Eric Lamond, Larry Fine’s (Larry one of the Original Stooges) grandson, assisted them late in their careers and recalled that they still rehearsed routines they had done many times before. They made intricate, difficult simultaneous physical movements look natural and spontaneous. That professionalism and ability set them apart from other physical comedians. Emil Sitka observed, “Moe was all business and wanted the best performance possible from everyone. He was very particular about how fans were treated and how the gags were performed.”
   

When giving a presentation the goal is to make it look so easy that people say “I can do that!” many people get so nervous it looks like you are struggling to say the right thing. The best way to make a speech look easy is to prepare. Write and rewrite the speech. Rehearse and rehearse. Know you presentation so well that you can add your personality to it. Know it so well that you can concentrate on the delivery of it and not worry about just trying to say the next line. Try recording it and listening to yourself. This is a good way to perfect your presentation you can tell what sound good and what needs more work. Too bad some of those auditioning for American Idol didn’t do that they wouldn’t have embarrassed themselves in front of millions of viewers.

When I am giving my motivational humor speeches I prepare weeks in advance so that I know exactly what I am going to say and I can concentrate on my delivery. I rehearse and rehearse and depending on the audience I even take it to a test audience to make sure the humor will work. Much of the material is material I use over and over, but I want to make sure that the material is right for the audience I will be speaking to and any new material intended specifically for that particular audience fits in to the presentation.

Many people don’t like to memorize their speeches or rehearse too much because they are afraid that it will start to sound rehearsed. This is true if you are just attempting to memorize you presentation, but if you are always working to enhance the delivery it won’t sound stale when you give it. The better you know your presentation the easier it will be to “ad lib” a line here and there creating a spontaneous feel to it. Work hard preparing your speech so that it is so good people will say, “I can do that!”