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Comedic Contagion

By Peter Lloyd

So I’m listening to Car Talk one Saturday on my NPR radio station. Click and Clack are laughing out car and life advice as usual. This time, however, I notice something. It has to do with the caller. She’s funny, too. It’s always been that way, I recall. Could Car Talk callers be beneficiaries of comedic contagion?

After going through the young woman’s auto-related problem, one of the brothers suggests that she refer to her owner’s manual. “Owner’s what?” she jokes. Laughing with the brothers, I think about contact highs, yawn contagion, and how giggles spread through a group of friends, especially at solemn events like funerals.

photo of tom and ray magliozzi in studioSince humor and creativity are so closely related, according Edward de Bono, if humor is contagious, then possibly creativity is contagious as well. So is it true?

Back to Car Talk. Most of the callers, it seems to me, come up with almost as much humor as the brothers Magliozzi. I doubt that only comedians call the show, so it must be that funny people like Tom and Ray help their callers be funny. If so, then creative people must help other people be more creative.

It was only a notion, not even a theory. Until I read Annie Murphy Paul’s post in the New York Times "Grey Matter" column, It’s Not Me, It’s You.
We’ve all been there: you feel especially smart and funny when talking to a particular person, only to feel hopelessly unintelligent and inarticulate in the presence of another.

You’re not imagining things. Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.
Witty, funny, creative, it’s all the same. Right? They’re all contagious. And the key to contagion, I think, might be permission.

The magazine and website with the name Permission comes with a warning, “Remember, reading Permission makes you smarter, taller, cuter, better smelling, younger, better dressed, more successful, and a few bucks poorer.”

Let me leave you with a list of permissions from their website, just in case you need a bit of the creative and comdedic attitude they espouse.
  • Eat more vegetables.
  • Touch more dirt.
  • Stare at the sky when you walk.
  • Talk to strangers.
  • Compliment animals in a funny voice.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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