George Gilbert’s Motivational Humor

What simple step can you take to relieve stress, lower blood pressure, boost your immune system, and enjoy an overall feeling of well being? Laugh more. There is even evidence that laughter makes the heart grow stronger. Michael Miller, M.D., F.A.C.C., director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland says, “We don’t know yet why laughing protects the heart but we know that mental stress is associated with impairment of the endothelium, the protective barrier lining our blood vessels. This can cause a series of inflammatory reactions that lead to fat and cholesterol build-up in the coronary arteries and ultimately to a heart attack.” Elbert Hubbard said “Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.” Maybe the phrase “I died laughing” should be changed to “I died because I didn’t laugh.”

Have you ever heard someone say, “It hurts to laugh”? Actually laughter can ease pain. When you laugh you release a natural pain-killing drug in your system called endorphins. Endorphins are much like morphine but with no bad side effects. Norman Cousins, author of “Anatomy of an Illness”, who suffered from a chronic painful illness, found that if he could laugh for ten minutes he could get two hours of pain free sleep.

“Your Fired!” On a recent episode of “The Apprentice” Donald Trump fired one of the contestants for hiring a comedian to entertain at a corporate function. The comedian’s humor was inappropriate and embarrassed the team that hired her. Many times you will see a comedian and they are hilarious in the setting that they are in, like a comedy club, but put them in a corporate setting and they are not only inappropriate they are embarrassing. Just like when I would go see a movie with my friends and think it was the funniest movie I had ever seen. Then I rented it to watch with my parents and realized after we were watching it that there were some scenes in it that were too graphic in language or nudity and I was embarrassed not only to be watching it with them, but that I would ever recommend it to my parents in the first place.

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”

In college students look forward to going on spring break. They have been hitting the books all winter, writing term papers, and cramming for mid-term exams. They need a time to let go and de-stress. Unfortunately we can’t all drop our responsibilities and go to Palm Springs or Fort Lauderdale, but we can find ways to recharge our energies.

Unlike the college kids we can’t totally shed our inhibitions. What we can do is loosen up so that our performance at work doesn’t deteriorate. Actually, the work will improve if you are in a relaxed frame of mind and having a little fun on the job. There’s nothing wrong with hard work but constant hard work without a little levity can lead to burnout.

If you’re in a meeting try to inject a little appropriate humor to lighten the atmosphere, reduce some of that stress, and put others in a more receptive mood. Not only will humor improve the quality of your work but it can lead to better interactions and communication with your fellow workers. Just like individuals coming together on the playing field can make a successful baseball team, sharing humor in the work place can enhance teamwork in business.

Everyone needs to take a spring break, but we don’t have to go to a different location to do it. When you’re finding humor, laughing with others and enjoying yourself, that is the essence of what spring break is all about.

March 20th is the first day of spring. What a great opportunity to do some mental spring cleaning, get rid of those dark negative thoughts, and get out of those winter doldrums and lighten your mood.

In nature spring is a new beginning. It is the season when flowers bloom, the trees blossom, and animals come out of their winter hibernation. Just as a snake sheds its skin in the sping, shed those depressing thoughts by incorporating more humor into your life.

Days are getting longer and lighter so lighten your mood to suit the season.

In baseball March is the beginning of spring training. This is when the players get back into shape for the coming season. This is the time for us to begin our own spring training of humor. Look for the humor that has lain dormant, practice that humor and share it with others.

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.