SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Chris Duffy is a comedian, but he'd reached a point in his life where he'd nearly forgotten the joy of laughter.
CHRIS DUFFY: I was teaching at a school, and I was dealing with a lot of really tough issues. You know, kids who were dealing with poverty or struggling with home situations or housing insecurity.
PFEIFFER: But as Duffy describes in his new book, "Humor Me," a fifth-grader helped him find the funny alongside the grim.
DUFFY: I really had lost a lot of my sense of humor. There were not laughs in my day-to-day, and it became really unsustainable. Like, I just wasn't having fun, and I was burning out. And I felt like nothing I did really was making a difference. And then one of the students who I was working with, who actually was one of my more challenging students - he started a column in the school newspaper where he was a food critic who reviewed cafeteria food. And his reviews...
PFEIFFER: (Laughter).
DUFFY: ...Were so funny that I couldn't help but laugh. And it reconnected me to the idea that we can still be joyful and humorous and laugh even while we are in tough times and dealing with serious things. And that kind of transformed my life, to be honest.
PFEIFFER: And you make the argument in your book that humor can be taught, that we have humor muscles. Now, that surprised me because I sort of thought of humor as something you have or you don't have. So explain the muscular part of this.
DUFFY: Yeah. A lot of people think that you're either born with a sense of humor or you're not, and I just completely disagree with that for a couple reasons. One is I have been a professional comedian for 12 years, and I've seen tons of people go from not that funny to hilarious. And then I've also taught comedy to a lot of people, and I've seen how you can really learn the skills of comedy. And one of the biggest things for me is that a lot of humor is actually a practice, and it's a practice of noticing things that are odd and unusual and then asking some more questions about them. And the thing with any sort of attention or practice like that is the more that you do it, the easier it gets. So if you start noticing funny, unusual things, then you find that you notice more and more and more. And then your life is filled with hilarious, weird, unusual things, where before, it was kind of just a gray blur.
PFEIFFER: Although you also acknowledge in the book that after a while, we tend to go into autopilot. Like, our commute is the same. We might stop seeing things. So how do you think people should get out of their ruts or their routines and start thinking, that thing around me that I barely noticed is actually really entertaining?
DUFFY: OK. So we all have had this experience of, like, you walk into your house and it's not like you actually see anything in your house. You just know the path. You know it so well, you could do it with your eyes closed. You're on your commute, and you're not actually registering the things that you're driving past. You're just making the turns. And every once in a while, we get jolted out of that, and we notice what is actually in front of us. We actually see what is on the floor in our living room or what is next to us on the street. And that's not always funny, but that's the root of what can be funny, is to actually notice things.
So I encourage people to use what I would call a new-bathroom state of mind. And so the way that I think about this is, if you walk into a friend's house for the first time and you're using their restroom, you immediately notice, like, where is the hand towel? Do they put their toilet paper with the roll going down or do they face it over the top, the correct way? Do they have a book in the bathroom? Does the book kind of disturbingly look like it has been wet and then dry? Like, you notice all these things.
PFEIFFER: (Laughter).
DUFFY: So I think that the more that we can walk through the world with a little bit of that new-bathroom mindset, the more that we'll find the delightful, strange quirks that make us laugh and actually just make us pay attention.
PFEIFFER: There are some places where you might think it's a stretch to find humor. But you mention an example in your book involving a funeral home, and I thought this one was very funny. And typically, if we're in a funeral home, it's not a happy setting. So can you tell the funeral home anecdote?
DUFFY: One of my friends, Michael (ph), had a real tragedy and had a loss. And he was at the funeral home, and he was paying the bill afterwards. And when they gave him the receipt, it said, thank you. Hope to see you soon. And he said, like, there's no place in the world that I would hope to be seen soon less than the funeral home. What are you doing? But it also made him laugh for the first time in a really long time. Him and his wife - they had a really cathartic laugh. And I think...
PFEIFFER: Yeah.
DUFFY: ...That idea - right? - that humor can snap us out of how we're feeling. It's not that it actually changes the situation. It didn't, like, improve the fact that they had had a horrible loss. But it made them, for a moment, have this release.
PFEIFFER: There are many people, obviously, today who feel very down about the state of the world. You know, we know that there's a loneliness epidemic, that a lot of people feel isolated. Many people feel dismayed about politics. And because of that, people can actually feel a little guilty laughing or being lighthearted. What's your advice for them?
DUFFY: Yeah. It's something that I really relate to. I mean, you know, sometimes, especially 'cause my job is to make people laugh, when the world is really terrible, it feels like, what am I doing? I mean, like, there's tragedy. There's death. There's violence. There's war. What is the purpose of laughing? But what I keep coming back to is that humor and laughter - for me, they're kind of the opposite of toxic positivity, right? The idea that, like, hey, there's a silver lining in every cloud. Like, don't worry. There's a war going on, but there's a bright side. And that's ridiculous, right? Sometimes there are just things that are bad. They're just bad. They're not good.
And humor, to me, doesn't say, actually, it's good, but it lets you laugh at it. Sometimes it's funny how bad it is, right? Like, any parent can relate to, you're having a day where you're totally overwhelmed. Nothing is going right. And then, right when, finally, it looks like the kids are going to go to sleep, one of the kids throws up all over the floor. And you just have to laugh 'cause it's like, this couldn't possibly be worse timing. But the laughter lets you release the tension. It lets you acknowledge the ridiculousness of the situation.
PFEIFFER: On the website for your book, there's a blurb that really attributes a lot of power to humor. It says that humor can help you make friends, be healthier physically and mentally, be more creative, get through hard times. I mean, how powerful, ultimately, do you think humor is?
DUFFY: Well, I think that there's a ton of research that shows how important human connections are to our lives, that one of the biggest predictors of our health and our longevity is how many people you feel like you can talk to. And to me, that can sometimes feel like a homework assignment, right? Like, oh, I have to go out and talk to someone or call a friend or send a letter or do this work. And I think that the big power of humor is that it makes all of that work feel fun. It makes it feel like play, and it makes you magnetic. Everyone loves to spend time with someone who's laughing and who's joyful and who makes them laugh and have joy.
PFEIFFER: It's true...
DUFFY: And so...
PFEIFFER: ...Isn't it? You gravitate towards those people.
DUFFY: Totally. They're magnetic. So I think that humor - its superpower is that it lets you make those really all-important connections with other people in a way that feels effortless.
PFEIFFER: That's Chris Duffy. He's the author of "Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, And Happy." Chris, thank you.
DUFFY: Oh, thank you. This was an absolute pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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