How To Humor, Seriously: Why A Stanford Team Loves Us Enough To Share This Rubber Chicken
Just in time for Americans to tackle 2021, two women have created something we all desperately need: An important book on the true power of humor. Your humor, in fact — this page-turner, crammed with data and celebrity anecdotes, is a user’s guide to how to wield levity and strengthen our bodies, careers, teams, families and love lives.
Meet Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jennifer Aaker, pictured above right. A behavioral psychologist whose oeuvre focuses on purpose and meaning, Aaker has long generated teaching awards and wait-lists for classes on atypical MBA topics like purpose, story and well-being. This time Aaker joins forces with a colleague who moonlights as an improv comedian and executive coach, Stanford Lecturer Naomi Bagdonas (above left), to create and publish “Humor, Seriously.”
It’s a scream. The meticulous research in this book does not get in the way of its tone. “Humor, Seriously” reads like the co-authors are 1.5 cocktails into an afternoon soiree at Burning Man, the only place outside a university campus where I’ve ever (a) had so much fun while (b) being inundated with so much STEAM data. Artfully done: It barely registers that you’re learning how humor will improve blood flow, arterial wall stiffness, lung action and likelihood to conceive — all while dramatically enhancing how colleagues, employees and family feel about you.
A Yelling Steph Curry and Sarah Cooper Before The Pandemic
As one would expect from a tenured chair like Aaker, the duo’s studies involve 1.5 million people in 166 countries, and their footnotes (charmingly written) reveal a disciplined tour of neuroscience, medicine, economics and psychology — applied, experimental, evolutionary, organizational, positive and social.
Aaker and Bagdonas know their shizzle; in fact, I can personally confirm that Aaker knows pretty much everybody and possesses a clairvoyant talent sensor. Want proof? Comedian Sarah Cooper. Years before we chortled into our quarantinis over her Tweets, Cooper was work-shopping humor with MBA students as part of the “Humor, Seriously” syllabus.
Cooper joins a pantheon of global and industry-specific celebs in these pages — I once watched Venture Capitalist David Hornik enter their Stanford classroom in a lamé suit and wig. In this book, Ed Catmull confesses Pixar once lost its fun, and shares how it was found. NBA legend Steph Curry, faced with a room of tense investors, unleashes his Steve Ballmer imitation (YES, ALL CAPS EQUALS SCREAMING).
So How Do We Heal Our Broken Funny Bones?
Kicking off with the soul-crushing data that once humans go to work we don’t laugh much again until we retire, the authors introduce examples, practices and guidelines for identifying and creating delight:
“Don’t get us wrong: We care about you becoming a badass business titan. We care about your bottom lines. But we care more about you as a whole person. We care more about your opportunity to use the concepts in this book to live better, more fulfilling lives (that will one day conclude with no — or at least fewer — regrets).”
After observing the dramatic changes in their own MBA students, the authors developed an approach to helping fellow humans audit and identify their humor personality, learn about different types of humor, and then embark in hot pursuit of laughter. The audit is practical and painless — if you’re an introverted writer, like me, there’s a humor approach that might suit you better than the stage-dominating brilliance of Kevin Hart or Ellen DeGeneres.
(Although don’t count me out: In one of the book’s most helpful anecdotes, Bagdonas, who has done stand-up for years, uses quick wit in a big meeting to defang an older, white, male bully and turn him into a fan. I sure could have used that approach while fundraising as an entrepreneur.)
Perhaps the Best CRM and Management Tool Ever Produced In Silicon Valley
Without lecturing the reader, the authors deliver on a playbook for the oxymoronic “institutional levity.” Shifting mindsets and unlocking team creativity can be massively profitable, and ”Humor, Seriously” is deadly serious about how and why. Prepare to truly understand why silly skits, bad idea brainstorms, buzzword bingo and, in rare cases, reassembling motor vehicles in the boss’s office may be business best practices, even — and perhaps especially — in tough times.
Proof this book may be the best CRM and management tool ever produced in Silicon Valley emerges in the coaching Aaker and Bagdonas deliver on, well, how not to be an asshole. In an exercise they call The Spectrum, every MBA in their class rates humor on a scale from completely appropriate to completely inappropriate. The result? Disagreement! In an era where workforces are waking up to the unconscious bias that permeates human interaction, and what we don’t know we don’t know about each other, these authors spell out what jokes you can’t tell and why because of how the jokes are perceived.
The exercise is not one of political correctness, but rather of the kind of expertise wielded by the best in the humor business, from The Onion to The Moth: Think like your audience. Because the quality of your funny is determined by your customer, you must consider their pain, their truth.
In one of the excellent hand-drawn figures in the book (it takes huge expertise to write this short), the authors spell out the extraordinary risks to your reputation if you use humor harmfully. Managers, buy this book and read the footnotes: “Punching down,” or taking advantage of your power, ha-ha, badly damages your status with employees, perhaps even more than it hurts their feelings.
The good news: When we do mess up, or fail to be approachable, Aaker and Bagdonas detail the solve: Apologize. Sincerely.
The authors take risks too. Some of their humor is corny. Almost all of it is self-deprecating. And while Aaker and Bagdonas are indeed funny, wickedly so in some places, what comes across in these pages is the kernel code of humor…
Love. In the final pages, Aaker shares the inspiration for her ongoing study of a life well lived, her mother’s 40-year practice as a hospice nurse. Without spoilers, here’s a taste of the good professor’s final say, via a delicious afterword with Author Michael Lewis:
Jennifer: One last thing before we leave you. At the end of the book, we talk about the relationship between love and humor — how sharing a laugh is a little expression of love. Is that something that’s been true in your own life? Please say yes.
{ slides $100 bill across the table }
Michael: Yes.
Humor, Seriously is available Feb 2. Pre-order your copy here: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Target, Hudson Booksellers.
P.S. The authors have informed me they are doing a charity match. When you buy 2+ hardcovers by Feb. 2, 2021, Aaker and Bagdonas will donate that many books to a nonprofit of your choice (enter the info here) and also send you a special edition digital version of the book (bit.ly/humorspecialgift).
