It pays to be funny
It pays to be funny
By Tony Spencer-Smith
Learn how humour can make your writing more engaging and memorable. Discover techniques from experts on using humour effectively in business and creative writing.
One of the best ways to unleash the power of words is to lose your inhibitions. Many of the things we write don’t cut through to our readers because we take our writing and ourselves too seriously, particularly in business writing. We are afraid to be playful; we are strait-laced and afraid to have fun.
Nowhere is this clearer than in our use of humour, or rather the failure to use it.
Neuroscience has long shown the marvellous things that humour can do to your brain. As Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas at the Stanford Graduate School of Business say: “When we laugh, our brains release a cocktail of hormones that make us feel happier (dopamine), more trusting (oxytocin), less stressed (lowered cortisol), and even slightly euphoric (endorphins).”
It can cut down the barriers between you and your readers, make a potentially dry point in a hilarious and memorable way, and help communicate difficult messages.
As William Zinsser says in his great book On Writing Well:
“Humour is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer. It’s secret because so few writers realize that humour is often their best tool – and sometimes their only tool – for making an important point.”
Genuine humour that springs from the content
Note what we’re not talking about telling jokes here. We’re not trying to be stand-up comedians. We’re trying to enliven what we have to say by seeing the funny as well as the serious side of things. We’re talking about things like amusing and relevant true-life anecdotes, or finding a genuinely amusing way to make a point.
In his book Talk Like Ted: the 9 public-speaking secrets of the world’s top minds, Carmine Gallo analyses more than 500 TED talks to see what made them irresistibly interesting. He looks at the most popular TED talk ever, by Sir Ken Robinson, on why schools kill creativity, which attracted more than 15 million views. He decides that its success is Robinson’s use of humour.
Robinson opened his talk by saying: “If you are [asked to a party] and somebody says, “What do you do?’ and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They’re like, ‘Oh my God, why me? My one night out all week.’” He then went on to use humour again and again to make the audience think and laugh at the same time.
Humour as a demolition job
Humour is also a great way to skewer an opponent or shoot down an idea.
There are lot of forms of devilishly destructive humour, from sarcasm to parody. Adam Kay uses all of them in his expose of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, This is Going to Hurt: secret diaries of a junior doctor.
Here’s one example: “Today, I’m asked to review a twenty-year-old patient whose blood tests show abnormal renal function. Both his arms are in full plaster casts … He’s got no drip for fluids and an untouched glass of water on his bedside table that … physics has prevented him from touching for the past couple of days. I prescribe IV fluids for the patient, though it would be more efficient to prescribe common sense for some of my colleagues.”
Humour is just one of the numerous ways in which you can supercharge words. If you want learn more, and turn your writing from okay to mesmeric, you can do it at CCE’s new course, The Secrets of Eloquence.
Tony Spencer-Smith is an award-winning novelist, a former Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest Magazine and an experienced corporate writer and writing trainer. His book The Essentials of Great Writing was published in Sydney in 2009. His course The Secrets of Eloquence is the culmination of all he has learnt about the writing craft, both as a writer and a trainer.