By Daniel Gregory and Marty Wilson
Is this really just an elaborate attempt by two former class clowns to legitimise their poor behaviour and prove they were right all along?
Well, kinda!
But humour and learning were at odds long before either of us interrupted a maths class with an armpit fart or morphed an English teacher's name from Mr Seamus to Mister's Anus.
The problem seems to be that most people just don't take humour seriously. As legendary stand up comedian George Carlin once said, "This job used to be called ‘Fool'".
Classroom humour also gets a lot of bad press, so much so that many of us had a negative view of humour drummed into us as an after class punishment:
"The classroom is not the place for jokes…
"The classroom is not the place for jokes…
"The classroom is not the place for jokes…"
But despite all this, humour has proven to be not only a powerful tool, with the capacity to render a potentially boring subject palatable, it also aids retention, lowers barriers to new thinking and helps teachers and coaches engage their students' more fully. Want to teach men and women how to communicate better?
You're going to need a healthy helping of humour. Anyone who read John Gray's Mars and Venus classic and didn't laugh, didn't get it.
Training salespeople in building rapport? It helps if you can elicit an empathetic smile and help everyone relax with a shared laugh. Giving a lesson on indirect taxation and the changes to company reporting with regard to the 2007-2008 tax code? Well, good luck with that!
Learning isn't just about memorising a series of facts by rote or simply absorbing information, it's at its most powerful when it creates understanding and shifts perception in such a way that it makes sense not just to your mind, but in your body, heart and soul.
Learning in a peak state
Many of our modern teachers and peak performance coaches will tell you that you learn and retain more in a peak state, that the information isn't just recorded, it becomes part of your neurology. We have to agree.
New research also suggests that memory is cellular, that the mind and body are not separate entities operating independently of each other, but that they act in concert.
Laughter is one of those rare moments when body and mind are aligned. It's an involuntary response where new ideas and information can enter the system while the defences are down.
Watch how quickly kids learn the rules to a game and you'll get an idea of how learning might be accelerated with laughter.
Entertaining new ideas through entertaining new ideas
Laughter also has the ability to break down resistance to new thinking, and just as importantly, to challenge old beliefs.
Whether critiquing or simply evaluating current, possibly outdated beliefs or raising potential possibilities with "Imagine if" statements, humour helps the mind stay open. It's even in our language. How often do we say "Humour me"?
And what seems funny in one time has a habit of proving possible in another.
Creating empathy and understanding
When people like John Gray and Allan and Barbara Pease talk about relationships, the lessons, analogies and even the tragic stories they tell are peppered with humour.
It seems both sexes have evolved in precisely the right way to maximise both the opportunity to learn and to laugh as well. You need look no further than the fact that men hit their sexual peak in the late teens and women in their thirties, or watch a woman read a map while a guy refuses to ask for directions. The comedy is exquisite and universal.
Humour is often a sure sign that there is a lesson here to be learned and when a room laughs together, it's because an understanding has been reached, an unspoken truth has been revealed or a common experience has been acknowledged.
Many a true word is spoken in jest.
Make learning from mistakes more enjoyable
The old adage has it that "when it happens to me it's a tragedy, when it happens to you, it's a comedy". Being able to greet mistakes and missteps with lightness and humour makes the inherent lesson more apparent... even when it's happening to you.
Humour can create context for information that makes it more pertinent and more memorable.
Something as simple as falling down could be an error we repeat all our lives if not for laughing at ourselves, and others, and then thinking "Well I won't do that again".
Increase retention
Almost all of us have forgotten passwords and key codes on our personal bank accounts - important stuff to forget.
But even the least funny of us can recite a knock knock joke or two or tell you why a chicken might want to cross the road or regale a dinner party, in exquisite detail, with the story of what happened to them while they were backpacking in Peru and what they learned as a result.
Humour often builds an analogy, or a consequence or a vivid example into a lesson, making it not just more potent, but more likely to be recalled at a later date. Laughter has the ability to make ideas sticky.
Humour helps you connect
When we wrote our book What I wish I knew at Eighteen we interviewed over one hundred people and we were greeted with equal doses of laughter and tears.
People opened up about the most painful experiences of their lives – being interned at a Siberian work camp as a child during World War II, being shot at by pirates (no kidding), being diagnosed breast cancer and kidney disease.
But when these "next-door Socrates'" shared their stories, they instinctively knew to throw in a few gags to make subjects that were often heavy going accessible, inspirational and memorable. Shared laughter creates an almost instant rapport.
The reason humour is so critical to learning is that it makes you think — a head full of facts does not make you intelligent, it makes you a library. We've discovered that humour adds the capacity to imagine, empathise, analyse and apply and is a truer measure of intelligence.
Honest Mr Seamus.
Writers, Stand Up Comics and Communications Experts, Daniel Gregory & Marty Wilson are the authors of What I Wish I Knew at Eighteen. www.whatiwishiknew.com
