CAREFUL & PLAYFUL

Steve Kissell (1993). Surviving Life with Laughter.

Kissell has a Navy background and then went back to college to become an elementary teacher before embarking on his laughter career as a speaker and writer.

Many of the suggestions for incorporating laughter, as the book was written in the 1990's, would be considered harassment today, underscoring the need to be careful and playful in applying "jokes" (especially pranks) on others, especially in school and work settings...read the context, situation, person(s) to decide if a gag, joke, riddle is appropriate

Kissell has four pages of references at the end. He suggests laughter can distract us from stress, creates feel-good hormones to reduce stress, and is just plain fun. He also mentions Norman Cousin's claim that 10 mins of laughter equals 1 hour of pain reduction, a hypothesis that i invite you to test when you're in "pain."

some of the humor ideas that resonated with me:

• read comics for fun
• look for the funny in everyday events
• turn a chore into an adventure (i recall the scene in the Mary Poppin's movie where she sings, "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down")
• keep some tennis balls or scarves to juggle, a bottle of soap bubbles...in your office for a "fun break" when stress is mounting
• collect favorite jokes/riddles in a little notebook and read them when stressed

one pragmatic piece of advice, not related to humor, was to use a colored highlighter to cross things off the "to do" list instead of using a pen/pencil to scribble over the words of an item so that you can still read your accomplishments at the end of the day...seeing what you've done in bold highlighter flips the script from, "oh dang, there's all these things i haven't done--the things not crossed off the list" to "yeah! look at all the things i have done highlighted in bold color"