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Sense of Humor Tricks
The Rule of Three
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The Rule of Three is commonly used by presenters as a way to
organize the content and delivery of their presentation. Why? Because humans process information using patterns and three is the smallest number of elements required to create a pattern. It is a well-known recognized pattern that sits in the sweet spot of graspability and memorability.
This is especially effective when you are listing serious points. Why? Because the audience is going along listening to you only expecting all seriousness and, then, ‘flip,’ a fun, unexpected surprise of comic relief is offered instead. And remember to be sure to delay the 'not-serious' punchline with an extra pause.
Breaking this logical sequence by changing the third point with
something that is "unexpected, weird, or contradictory" is called a
'comedic surprise,' and if no on-one sees it coming, smiles and
laughter are sure to follow.
'The Rule of Three' formula is easy and excellent for creating a fun moment of levity and laughter when people don't see your sense of humor coming. The secret is everything short of the punchline needs to be delivered humorlessly in the usual oratory humdrum pattern of "boom, boom, boom." When you deliver 'boom, boom, bang" (aka. serious, serious, not serious) the punchline comic relief device of The Rule of Three lets you add welcome lightness to any communication.
"As a speaker, the three most important things I need to deliver to my
audience is credibility, irrefutable value, and a lunch and wine menu.
Robert Bostick
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Benjamin Disraeli
"If you decide to vote for me you should know
that I'm for God, for Country, and for Yale.
And not necessarily in that order."
George Bush Sr.
"There are three types of people in this world:
those who make things happen,
those who watch things happen,
and those who wonder what happened."
Mary Kay Ash
"Rather than selling my services, I spent a tremendous amount of
money advertising them. It didn't work. So then I learned how to sell.
I sold my house. I sold my car. I sold my furniture."
Brian Tracy
"A good speech should be like a comet:
Dazzling, eye-opening, and over before you know it."
Unknown
"The pessimist complains about the wind;
the optimist expects it to change;
the realist adjusts the sails."
William Arthur Ward
"The three loves of my life are: my wife, my kids, my pillow."
Anonymous
"If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt."
Dean Martin
"I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking
than waking up next to someone and not being able to
remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead."
Laura Kightlinger
I begin all my talks by saying,
"There are three key points I will be talking about today." and I then I keep them hanging onto every word by never revealing the third one.
Robert Bostick
Exaggeration & Understatement
The Rule of Three is also a Formula for Creating Warm Welcome Humor
Exaggeration & Understatement
The most common form of humor we share as adults is the comic
art of exaggeration and understatement. Whether you think you're funny or not, you've participated in this easily accessible form of comedic wit. We do it at work. We do it with our families. We do
it with ourselves.
For example, who hasn't woken up, looked in the mirror with your
hair looking like a briar patch, and exaggeratingly said to yourself,
Examples of exaggeration and understatement are everywhere
around us and are the easiest tool in our humor toolbox to avoid taking life too seriously and create likable, relatable humor. Especially about ourselves.
In the following video clip, HumorPoint's founder, Robert Bostick, uses this likable humor technique to deliver a self-deprecating one-liner about his imagined success. See if you can discern if he's using exaggeration or understatement for his laugh line.
Exaggeration, right? ie. The exaggerated amount of views. This surprising ' in my mind' comedic twist can be applied to any unrealized aspiration. By selling the audience on the result he'd hoped to get as
if it happened, and then pulling the comedic rug out from under their expectation, he delivered a surprise punchline no one saw coming
- ie. the best kind.
Pulling the rug out from people's expectations is a tried and true
laugh triggering technique. In this one minute excerpt from his
Ted Talk on Procrastination, Tim Urban does it to perfection by
getting us to accept his exaggerated success only to pull out the admiration rug we feel towards him leaving us to laugh at his failure instead.
3 is a Magic Number Theme Song
To see Tim's full hillarious Ted talk click here
By delivering, pitch-perfect, self-deprecating humor, Tim leaves
us liking him more than if he touted his actual success. Seasoning your message by having some fun with a moment of exaggeration
or understatement is an easy recipe for likable self-deprecating humor. You will find lots of self-deprecating humor on The Perfect Self-Deprecating Humor humor tool page.
Exaggeration and Understatement at Work
You will often see exaggeration and understatement used at work
as part of the natural effort to connect with others and have a little
fun with the endless stresses and changes. Understatement and
exaggeration are also popular in the use of sarcasm.
Self Deprecation, understatement, and exaggeration can work well
for political likeability and leadership. After losing the 2008 election,
John McCain was on The Tonight Show and Jay Leno asked him,
"How are you sleeping?
What makes this next joke funny - exaggeration or understatement?
It's the exaggeration that makes it funny, right? He's exaggerating
being a stuffed shirt by condescendingly telling the audience what
the definition of condescending is. It's crowd-pleasing humor that
anyone can drop into their talk if they don't mind being the butt
of their own joke.
Roger Dawson, a master negotiator, in his book, Secrets of Power Persuasion, says, "Nothing positions people for persuasion as well
as a sense of humor." An entire chapter in his book is focused on developing this skill. Here is an excerpt from it:
The power persuader sees a good sense of humor as having
a two-fold purpose: it makes the other person receptive to being
persuaded, and equally important, it’s also an excellent way to
point out to the other person that they are wrong without
causing offense.
And there is an important side benefit of a sense of humor - it
is going to stop you from having a nervous breakdown some-
day. “What happened to Harry”, you hear at the office water
cooler-”Oh he just couldn’t take the pressure - he just cracked.”
What cracks?
Things that are hard and brittle. Things that are soft and flexible
don’t crack--they bend. Many noted psychiatrists say that the
very definition of good mental health is a flexible, humor-filled
attitude.
One of the easiest ways to garner a laugh is exaggeration.
When we stretch a thought to a ludicrous point it triggers some-
thing in our mind that makes us laugh. Fred Allen used to talk
about the scarecrow that was so scary the crows and blackbirds
not only stopped stealing the corn, they started bringing back the
corn they had stolen two years before.
Most golfing stories are only funny because of the way they
exaggerated their passion for the game. “Why did it take so long
to play?” “Harry had a heart attack on the 7th fairway. From then
on it was hit the ball, drag Harry, hit the ball, drag Harry.”
I was playing golf with a friend who likes to joke about his age.
After the first hole, he said “Toss me the ball. At my age, I don’t
care to get that close to a hole in the ground.”
We were playing five-dollar greens. When he hit the greens on
the first par three I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my pocket,
“Why don’t we settle up at the end.” he said, “Ok, but at your
age”, I replied, “I thought you’d like to settle up up hole by hole.
They’re all the same joke. The same theme of exaggeration that
triggers the laugh. Only the words have been changed.
A mother is trying to persuade her sleepy child to quit watching
television and go to bed. To head off a possible conflict she uses
a little humor. As she puts her arm around the child she says,
“Come on Dear, if you watch any more television your eyeballs
will turn square.” “Oh mommy you are silly,” she says as she
smiles. But she quietly gets up and goes with her to the bedroom.
So if we take a point and stretch it to the ridiculous it triggers a
laugh. But what if we go the other way. What if we compress a
point to the ridiculous? We downplay it down with understatement
instead of emphasizing it with exaggeration. Yes, that works too.
For example, the buyer leans back in his chair and says to the
salesperson, “Joe we would love to buy to buy your product, but
your prices are too high.” But Joe is a pro-power persuader. Instead
of taking offense at that and creating confrontation, he defuses the comment by feigning surprise and saying, “Gee, Charlie, you are
the first buyer who has ever mentioned price to me. I didn’t know
price was important to you.”
My purpose is not to turn you into a stand-up comedian. I don’t
want you to become a person who is known primarily for the
jokes that you tell. You know somebody like that. They’re not
good persuaders. As a manager, they are not taken seriously
and as a salesperson, they never develop the credibility as
someone who takes things more seriously.
A sense of humor allows you to increase your likeability and
leadership ability. Most importantly it is a skill that can be
learned. Exaggeration and understatement are just two more
humor tools in your humor toolbox to develop your humor
competency to pitch-perfect.
Examples of Traditional Exaggeration:
“I’ve heard it a million times.”
"I'm so hungry I could eat a cow."
"He's slower than a snale."
"This bag weighs a ton."
"For the millionth time stop over exaggerating."
"A thousand people came through here and that's no exaggeration."
He's not the brightest crayon in the box.
She's not the brightest light on the tree.
He's not the sharpest tool in the shed.
She's a few fries short of a happy meal.
He's a few clowns short of a circus.
She left the store without all her groceries.
He's as busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
She's as busy as a one-armed woman in a paper hanging contest.
Summary
Humor can be used to strengthen almost any form of communication,
from group presentations and personal conversations to business letters.
Building humor into your written communications will energize and reinforce them in many ways. Perhaps most importantly, humor closes the gap between speaker/writer and listener/reader by building an emotional bridge. It’s hard to overstate the value of this point.
The purpose of most communications is to persuade. It is difficult, if not
impossible to be persuaded by someone you don’t like. Can you imagine
buying a product or an idea from a person you dislike?
Use all the various humor tools to enhance your communications. Just as
an artist uses many different colors, so you will be more effective drawing
on different elements of humor to strengthen your persuasive powers.
Remember: your messages will fly better if you send them on the wings
of humor.
And that's no exaggeration.
"Geeze, you like a million bucks this morning."
An example of sarcastic exaggeration at work might be a co-worker
gets the promotion you thought you deserved, and then, feeling a
little bad, asks you, "Tom, you're ok with this, right?" and you say,
"Of course I am Phil. You're going on your fifth year here and I'm
going on my twentieth. You'll be able to teach me a lot."
Sarcastic humor can garner a laugh to yourself or others, but it may
not do much for one's likeability. Why? Because sarcasm is often
cynical humor that can taste bitter to listen to - leaving people
with a bad taste in their mouth about your sense of humor.
Just as there is eating etiquette, there is humor etiquette too.
Humor Etiquette Do's & Dont's provides excellent guidance.
The studio audience fell in love with John for his self-deprecating
understatement in the face of such a loss. That's the power of the
right touch of humorous understatement or exaggeration.
John said, "I'm sleeping like a baby.
I sleep for two hours. I get up and cry.
I sleep for two more hours,
and I get up and cry.
"Sharing a light touch of exaggeration or understatement can
be an easy way to enhance your likeability and disarm tension.
In negotiations, diffusing tension is job one. With understatement
and exaggeration - like stretching a rubber band - it's a question
of how far to pull it for just the right amount of tension for your punchline to provide the perfect note of lightly poking fun at
yourself, your topic, the group, or someone in your audience.
A quick note of caution. If you are exaggerating one of your
shortcomings, especially one which is shared by many others,
people may feel that the zinger aimed at you, is aimed at them also.
For example, if you make jokes about you carrying a few extra pounds, you may not get laughs from someone dieting and watching the scale. Preferably the humor you use lightens up everyone.
The difference between having an entrepreneurial idea,