Humor should be used to sharpen the truth, not to dull it. Humor should never help people escape from a truth; it's easy to let people off the hook.
How can humor dull the truth? Here's an example: "Yes, we're all sinners—but how else could we enjoy life?" That remark would be buying a cheap laugh at the cost of an important point. The crowd would laugh—but there's an old saying, "While the audience laughed, the angels cried." That's one of my tests of appropriate humor: Do the angels laugh too?
I'm not a very good joke teller. Instead, I use situational humor. Jokes make you a comedian; situational humor makes you a Will Rogers. He had the ability to use humor to set up points. He did not dull them. I prefer to have the doctor lubricate the needle before he sticks me. That's what humor can do: lubricate the needle.
Good humor ought to be like good spice, permeating the whole. I object to a speaker who uses humor only at the opening of a talk. When I speak, I'm never more serious than when I'm humorous, because I am firmly convinced I can say almost anything with humor if I work at it.
It's true that some people have a greater gift for humor. But nothing is more attractive to an audience than somebody who has the humility of humor. A wealthy young businessman who's developing a national reputation asked me about public speaking, and I said, "Tell stories."
He said, "My ego wouldn't let me."
That's what keeps a lot of people from using humor. They want to seem heavy, profound. Others view humor as a high-risk venture; what if the punch line bombs? That, incidentally, is why I practice any major piece of humor on several friends before I ever use it in public.
For example, I said to my rather affluent class recently, "I'm very depressed today. .." (Normally I'm not depressed, and they know it. I also don't believe in using an audience for my own therapeutic purposes. I'm there for them; they're not there for me. So I wasn't complaining, but setting the stage.)
" I guess the reason I'm depressed is that Mary Alice and I just got back from two weeks in a very posh Colorado resort. And I realized I was the only one there with a green American Express card. "Do you know how embarrassing that is? All my friends had gold or platinum. It was just so hard to feel good about yourself. I mean, how are you going to impress a waiter with a green card? When it came time to pay the bill, I found myself hiding my card with my napkin. ..."
While I built up the spoof, they were laughing, but they were also thinking: That's one of my problems, isn't it? I could have stood up and preached against materialism and the danger of comparing ourselves with our neighbors, but they wouldn't really have heard me. Humor made the point much better. But I had to practice that parody on several friends in private conversation, to see how they responded, before I ever used it on an audience.
I have often said that humor is serious business. It's intentional and well-practiced use allows clearer and easier communication.
