Yesterday, someone told me they were tired, so I said, “Why can’t a bike stand up? It was two-tired!” You should always have four to five jokes in your arsenal ready to go…
— from “Using Humor to Build Trust at Work’ written by Brian M. Harman, PhD, in Forbes magazine, April 2019.
What’s happened to the world? People used to tell each other jokes, like the one about the bike that was two-tired.
And that built trust, according to people with a PhD after their name. You feel like you can trust someone, who has an arsenal of four or five jokes ready to go.
It has been scientifically proven: that humor builds trust. The family that laughs together, trusts together. Same goes for a business concern. And for political leaders. For that matter, for an entire nation.
(Not that the trust is always justified, of course. Most people get screwed over by someone they trusted. But long afterwards, they can laugh about it.)
But now, everyone is so serious.
How can we honestly trust a person who doesn’t know how to tell a joke?
Especially, politicians. I remember back in the Clinton administration, when almost everything the President said was a joke. Same with the Reagan administration. We trusted our politicians, back then, to make us laugh.
Did anyone ever hear Donald Trump tell a joke? I don’t think so. Can anyone even imagine Donald Trump telling a joke?
Joe Biden tries to tell jokes, occasionally, but he can never remember the punch line. Which is worse than not even trying.
My dad used to enjoy telling a joke, that had the punchline, “It only hurts when I laugh”. Thinking back on it, the joke was terribly gruesome, and probably marginally racist, so I’ve decided not to share it in this humor column. Even though it was really funny, the way my dad told it. If only my dad could have been elected President, we would probably trust politicians more. Not sure if that would be a good thing, but at least we would be laughing instead of crying.
Generally speaking, I’m leery of people who smile when they are trying to convince me to trust them. In fact, I am leery of people who are trying to convince me to trust them, even if they’re not smiling. To tell the truth, I don’t trust anyone, really. I don’t even trust myself. (As I confessed previously here in the Daily Post.)
But a joke is always just a made-up story that you are not expected to believe. You have to trust that the story never really happened.
And if the person can remember the punch line, we can laugh… and pretend, for a moment, that we all think the same thing is funny. And we can trust each other.
What a joke.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.