TED Radio Hour - Humor Us

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Original broadcast date: June 3, 2022. Humor can lighten the mood. But it can also provoke, cajole and inspire. This hour, TED speakers share how we can wield humor as a tool across all aspects of our lives. Guests include comedian Marcia Belsky, computer scientist Vinith Misra, behavioral scientist Jennifer Aaker, corporate strategist Naomi Bagdonas and science comedian Kasha Patel. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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From Ted and NPR. So this song, maybe you've heard it, maybe haven't. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. It is the true story about the first American woman who they ever sent to space, whose name was Sally Ride. Remember when NASA sent a woman to space for only six days and they gave her

100s amp on. 100 tampons. This is Marsha Belski. And they asked, will that be enough? I'm a comedian and musician in Brooklyn, New York. And Marcia is best known for this song about a very real event. 100 tampons went viral at the start of the pandemic. Here she is on the TED stage performing it.

Sausages, 100 tampons, a hundred tampons. I can picture it now. Come with me. I'm Sally Wright, and I'm going to space for the first time. I'm walking tall. I feel so proud. Then I see a man running panic through the crowd. He's holding a large bag.

I think what can this be? And then he hands 100 tampons to me And then he hands 100 tampons to me For one week Okay, Marcia, spell it out What made you write this song about Sally Ride? A song that is essentially mocking NASA So there was a story I think on Vox.

where she talks about how they gave her 100 tampons and didn't understand why that was kind of a ridiculous number. And what was funny to me is that the only thing I know about space adventures is that they are so selective about what comes on board, like down to the pound. Like it's like you cannot have an extra pair of socks. So it was so funny to me that they would allot these 100 tampons. And they asked her like, is 100 the right number? And she said, No, that is not the right number. I would have said maybe 33. And they also designed a makeup kit for her that they wanted her to take to space.

And she also said, no, thank you. Oh, my gosh. A makeup kit. All right. I mean, it does feel like this story is too ridiculous to be true. But it is true, and it's kind of hilarious. Did you wonder, though, like why this? This song of yours became so popular.

Was it the timing? Was it the topic? The tune? I did wonder, because, you know, I've had other songs that were semi-hits, but we're not ever going to go mainstream. Like, the song called All Older White Men Should Die, but not my dad. Like, we do these, like, really political, like, feminist songs that I think have sort of a cap in terms of where they can go audience-wise.

I think that 100 Tampons was very feminist and sort of, like, pushed people's brains a little bit, but it's not like so edgy that it's not palatable to like the masses, you know what I mean? But in terms of why I was successful in general, I didn't realize it until I was doing an interview for some local news station and she was like, well, don't you think it's great that you've started all this conversation around periods? And I had a ton of people messaging me, I talked to my dad about my period for the first time. And the dad is open to it because I think that's the hard. too is that society tells us don't talk about periods. And there are men who want to talk about periods, but don't know how, you know. And so I think in all areas, humor can be a really good way for people to just access emotions and conversations in a way that feels a little bit safer. And so my goal with my comedy was to always have it be that thing where you can get people to talk about things that are uncomfortable because they're laughing.

comedies, jokes, everyone loves a good chuckle. It's how we relax, lighten the mood. But humor can also be used as a secret weapon to provoke, cajole, teach. And during stressful times, when there's not that much to laugh about, maybe we should be wielding it more often. And so on the show today, ideas about using humor as a tool for talking politics, business, and even talking to, to our technology.

And if you're thinking, nothing is less funny than explaining why something is funny, well, just humor me and keep listening. Because after her tampon song went viral, comedian Marsha Belski discovered that some people really wanted to explain why her song wasn't funny. Men on the internet were furious about this song. Here she is again on the TED stage.

They were enraged. So I wanted to show you some of my favorite. genres of comments that I got. So this first one we have what I call the honest critic. Just offering a critique. Okay, so he starts, it was funny at first, but then she ruined it. Okay. All right. Let's hear him out. Someone said, please elaborate. All right, you have criticism. Let's hear it. She kept yapping about the tampons. Yeah. And you know what? Fair. So, you know, I'm going to take that. I mean, to be honest, the tampons is sort of a central part of. the song, but I'll take the note, you know, we'll work it going forward.

This next one I call the microgravity expert, and this was an absolutely amazing phenomenon, because what happened was, somehow within the three to four minutes of my song, thousands of men on the internet became experts in microgravity and menstruation. And I think that is so impressive because normally that sort of takes years to really understand. He said at that time nobody had experienced having a period of microgravity. Relax. Because really that's what they're angry about is they're sitting at their computer like, stop laughing. It isn't funny.

I just sort of saw it as kind of sweet how much they want to defend, you know, the integrity of the NASA scientists that like, you know, hang on. people had her best interest at heart with giving her 100 tampons for a week. Yes. There was a really good tweet, and I'm so sorry I can't remember who wrote it, but they said, I wish a man would defend me as much as he'll defend a man he's never met. Because they really, really feel protective. It is a community because the whole thing is that there is science behind periods that they could have looked into just like they do for any other bodily functions in space.

but instead they just wanted to throw 100 tampons at this lady and run away. The one, okay, the one feedback that you got or challenged to the premise that it was not the right thing to do to give her 100 tampons was the like, well, what if something happened she was stuck in space? I kind of get that one. What do you think about it? I mean, that's the thing is like the whole thing is just really funny because it's like this, what if she was up there and she needed 100 tampons?

because they're, I'm like, I kind of think that would be the last of her concern, to be honest. If you're stuck in space for like a year to the point, because 100 tampons is a year of supply for most people. That's what some, it's like, it's like most women use about 10 tampons per period. But I, the thing is, what's funny to me is I do not think they were trying to be safe. I don't think they gave her 100, like, let's just be safe, babe. I think they're like, is this, I mean, we don't, how do you? Like, they didn't even know about pads. What if she was a pads girl?

What if she used it? You know, what if she didn't even use tampons? It's like women heard the song and laugh because they know what periods are and they know why 100 tampons is a funny number. Men heard the song and they're like, well, I'm Googling and I can see that most women use three to 10 tampons per day, 10 being an absolute disaster of a flow. That's what this guy said to me. An absolute disaster of a flow. Because this is what their fear was, wasn't it? The men in NASA, they're like, she's going to get up there.

It's going to come out of her eyes and her ears and her mouth. mouth, 100 tepons. Boys, we're in trouble. We're in real trouble up there, boys. She was the only woman in a super male organization. And I think that's where the song connected with a lot of people, too, is I had tons of women messaging me from all sorts of professions, being like, I'm the only woman at my job.

I really connect with this feeling. Because it's more about that as well. It's more about all of these little things that happen when you're working with men who just don't even know that they don't know. about women's lives. But okay, as a comedian, your goal is clearly to go mainstream, which you did with this song. But did you care that maybe, I don't know, half the audience was like mad at you or did you just not give a crap? I didn't care.

No, because my, I don't think my goal is to go mainstream, honestly. I mean, I kind of made a decision pretty early on in my career. that I was tired of the standard being that you had to make the men in the audience laugh and then hopefully the women as well. Because, like, you know, in 2015, I started doing this kind of over-the-top feminist humor. And part of it was because I only cared about, like, making the women laugh. The comedy standard has always been the girlfriend sitting quietly next to the boyfriend waiting to see if he's laughing.

And I was like, screw that, you know. So when I finally reached that point in my career of realizing, like, I really didn't need them and I could be much more myself without worrying about them as an audience, it was very freeing. Hmm. I mean, with your comedy, you now have this huge platform. You can speak directly to women, also to men and to people who are going to disagree with you. But maybe you get to. get them to think a little bit about topics that they don't like thinking about? Oh, yeah.

I mean, I think that's why stand-up comedy, especially I always saw, is so powerful, is because it's literally just a person up there with a microphone who all of a sudden has a real, you know, threatening power to somebody in power if they can make a thousand people laugh. And so I think humor is the ultimate tool. I think humor is the tool that I have found the most. pleasure and hope in. And I think humor just gives people the ability to be honest with themselves and be honest about the world without that defeated feeling overcoming them so quickly.

There's a reason why, like, you know, if you've ever been grieving or if you ever, like, going through a breakup, like, and you have that one, like, first laugh that you get after you've been crying for three days or whatever, nothing in the world. world feels better than that. And so humor, I'm grateful for it. That's comedian Marsha Belski. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, humorous. I'm Minnuch Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zomerode. On the show today, humorous. I have some jokes. I can't, you know, promise that they'll be funny, but they are jokes. I think you'll agree

that they are jokes. This is Vinath Misra. And these are, the way I describe it is that you can imagine a late night host cracking these. That's the aesthetic. Vineth is a computer scientist, but I called him to hear some jokes. All right, hit me. A new report says that Americans are living longer. That's the good news. The bad news is that a lot of them are living in New Jersey. All right. I grew up in New Jersey, but I can tell you. Take it. Jersey's a bit of a punching bag, but. Speaking of punching bags, a Florida man says he found a rattlesnake in a bag of frozen broccoli.

That's terrible. Okay. He should have brought fresh. Okay, I'm laughing because it's true. Frozen broccoli is gross. It's just smushy. Now, it's debatable whether these jokes are funny. Maybe like so bad.

They're funny. They're definitely weird. I'll give you one more. I enjoy this one. a woman in Australia who found a spider in her bananas took it to a reptile park where it laid over 1,000 eggs. The woman said she was surprised to find so many eggs, but then she remembered she'd bought them at Costco. Oh, yeah. That's good. That's good. That one's for my mother-in-law, I think. What makes these jokes so interesting is that Vinneth did not write them. A friend did not write them.

They were not discovered in some bargain bin joke book. In fact, No one wrote them. Yeah, so these jokes were actually generated by a machine. There is a model called GPT3, which is made accessible via an organization called OpenAI. And it's actually not a joke model, per se. It's a more general language model. And there's a lot of different purposes, but it turns out it's also quite good at figuring out this aesthetic and shape of jokes. Vineth has long been fascinated by artificial intelligence.

He's worked on AI at IBM, Netflix, and now Roblox. And he says a big hurdle with artificial intelligence is just getting people to interact with their machines and AI more seamlessly. Computational humor could help bridge that gap. That's right. I'm talking about computational humor. That's using computers to generate and understand humor. Here's Vineth Misra on the TED stage. It's an actual field.

No joke. Sorry. So computers today, see, they're getting smarter, they're getting smarter, but they're also developing a sense of humor. And they have the potential to change how we relate to our mechanical friends, but also how we relate to each other. And to be clear, I don't think this is just a curiosity. As computers increasingly surround us in our lives,

I think it's going to be a necessity. Now, I wasn't always convinced of the value of relatable machines, let alone making you laugh with software. Why would I need my software to lighten the mood, right? But then I took a closer look at myself. See, I'm not an angry man, but I routinely fantasize about taking my laptop and smashing it against a rock.

Now, people, people frustrate me too. But the difference is that with people, I have a safety valve called humor. Even on a call with Comcast, someone cracks a joke, it changes the whole dynamic. We can look at humor as sort of the WD40 of human interactions. In a world where we're increasingly surrounded by computers, we're going to desperately need some of that lubrication or we're going to drown in the frustration.

Venice's appreciation of the power of humor goes way back to his childhood when he realized how quickly jokes could help him make friends. We were moving around a lot and I didn't really have a very static set of friends. I was born in India, I moved to Pennsylvania, then Alabama, then California. And, you know, I was a necessary. the most gregarious person to begin with. And it wasn't the easiest thing. But I did realize, you know, like cracking jokes could be a way to make those connections. And what I resorted to was, in hindsight, basically creating these sort of algorithms for jokes.

So I'd start with a joke like this one. What do you call a bee that eats too much? Chubby. I was in elementary school, cut me some slack. Now, I'd recognize not being a total morn, that the humor in this joke comes from the similarity of chubby, B and B. And then I'd replicate this tons of times. What do you call a B that's good for your health, a vitamin B. What do you call a newborn B, a baby? What do you call a B in the spring? A maybe. You get the idea. Now, what's interesting, though, is that this process that I described for you, this very hackish and uncreative process, it may not sound like an algorithm, but it is.

And now, as an adult, as a technologist, you look back and you see sort of very rudimentary coding that was happening in your mind, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that stuff was essentially algorithms, right? It's a very simplistic algorithm. So if you had to replicate what I was doing with that computer, and this is actually kind of like old school natural language processing or computational humor, so in this case, you craft a sentence that's structured in a very particular

way that needs certain words or phrases that fit certain parts of speech and rules within that sentence and you look up basically lists of words that kind of fit that profile. And you kind of swap them in. It's just a very deterministic, honestly, kind of a dumb process. Most of the thinking is happening when you're creating that structure in the first place. That's where that's where you have to put on your thinking hat. It kind of reminds me of Madlibs, you know, just swapping in nouns and verbs to make funny, surprising sentences. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think Madlib is a wonderful connection to, you know, these sort of algorithms. And Madlibs are actually,

they are an algorithm. They just have a prompt where humans need to enter some of the data in there. But to use this more generally and broadly, we're going to have to go beyond puns. To the more unstructured and subtle humor that we humans engage in pretty regularly. I mean, think about the last thing that made you laugh.

Chances are, not only was it not a pun, it probably wasn't even a joke. In some sense, the real goal for us here, It's not necessarily to create machines that are going to write jokes for us, but to create machines with personalities that we find humorous or amusing. Now, to get to personalities, though, we often have to go through language, and language is a bear.

Your average English speaker knows tens of thousands of words and breaks grammatical rules about as often as he follows them. And even if you can get past that, there's issues of ambiguity, context, and general common sense knowledge. When I ask you, how much does President Obama make? Somehow you know I'm asking about his salary, not about how much soup he makes. This is very hard to encode into an algorithm.

But in recent days, we may have caught a break. We may have found a back door. And this back door has a big sign on it. That's a hint. And the sign reads data. Most behaviors, most phenomenon in the world are just so complicated. It's actually pretty hard to capture all of them

with a set of rules. And that's where machine learning kind of came in as an alternative to all of us, where instead of trying to write a lot of these rules yourself, you actually let the machines kind of do that for you. You give a bunch of data to them. That's just sort of evidence and observations about whether it's human behavior, human language, what have you, maybe examples of jokes. And you sort of allow the machines to figure out those rules on their own. And how good are they at this point? Because, you know, of course, we have facial recognition and photo recognition that's gotten really good. Like it knows if it's a tiger, that's for sure. It knows if it's you. But where are we in terms of language is a very different beast for machines to understand and parse, right? And I feel like a lot of the time I hear that as we talk about machine learning, we don't necessarily know what the machine has taught itself.

to look for, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's a little bit of this black box phenomenon where you're sort of throwing a bunch of data at it and it's sort of figuring it out, but it's actually kind of mysterious what it's doing inside there. You know, most of the computers you interact with today, when they say something to you or they print some language to you, something for you to read, more often than not, that is almost always that is not generated by a computer. That's usually written by a human being and it's being kind of canned and delivered to you, right? And the reason is that the generation just isn't quite reliable and good enough. So even those examples of jokes I gave earlier, those are cherry-picked, right?

Like, those are probably like the top 10% of outputs from the model. I can give you the more typical outputs. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah. So here's one. A man in Florida was arrested after he tried to pay for his McDonald's order with cocaine. The police said they knew something was up when he tried to get change for a happy meal. So it's kind of like surrealie funny, and it has the shape of a joke, right?

It's got like Florida, it's got McDonald's, cocaine. These are all things you would expect. It has Florida. That's a really strong indicator, honestly. But at the end of the day, it's not really a cohesive joke. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. No, it's kind of trippy. I mean, the key here is that machines need vast amounts of data.

Right? So where does this data come from? Yeah. No, it's a great question. And yeah, there's this, there's this tenant in machine learning called garbage in garbage out, right? Like if you put in garbage data, your machine's going to basically be producing garbage for you too. But it's also biases. And, you know, like the type of data you're training on will inform your outputs in ways that you might not even realize. It's really like holding up a mirror to ourselves. And in some cases, not the not the pretty. part of ourselves. You're reminding me of that infamous incident a few years ago when Microsoft had a Twitter bot and racist Twitter bot. Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah, that was bad. Can you explain what happened there? So what Microsoft created was basically a chatbot on, I believe it was Twitter. And the interesting thing about this bot was not only was it trained on historical language, but it was also being trained on the conversations it was continuing to have with people. That is basically, people could basically continue to influence how the spot behaved by

engaging with it on Twitter. So you can imagine where the story goes. It wasn't very long before they had turned this seemingly, you know, innocent social experiment into, you know, this horrifying, like, Nazi-like Twitter presence that was saying things that, you know, I couldn't even repeat right now. Okay, so clearly computational humor can get dangerously offensive very quickly, especially if it's trying too hard. Yeah.

But what about when the stakes are lower? I think, like, it's interesting because designers, I feel like, have some rules of thumb and they've evolved over time around, like, what is the right amount of humor to inject into your web app design or your copy that you're putting into your website. And those norms have shifted over time. Like if you look at what a 404 page looked like in, you know, 1998, and you compare it to the kind of pun-type, jokey, 404 pages that we see nowadays. You mean like when a link is broken and you end up on a web page where it says, oops,

nothing to see here. Yeah, I think, you know, there's maybe a computational humor opportunity there, right? Like, what if you could actually remix and have multiple, like, 404 pages? And it actually becomes kind of like a little bit of softening of the experience. of the frustration that you feel when you're not finding what you're looking for? You're reminding me of my experience the other day trying to rebook an airline ticket with a bot that the airline named Nelly. And she was not funny.

She wasn't even that helpful. But could we get to a place where these programs are good enough to be reliably funny and make these interactions a little more enjoyable? It's a good question. And I think it's also a bit of a philosophical one around. art because comedy is a form of art. And I think humor is an example of that where, you know, a joke, you know, was not written by a human. Is that still funny? And I guess in some ways it is. I think it's definitely testing the limits of, you know, like what, you know, human computer relations can look like. Yeah. I mean, is this the ultimate Turing test, do you think? Like the ultimate... That's a great question. In certain ways, yes, right? Because humor is, is it is often thought of as sort of like the, you know, the place where we're not, the farthest frontier of human intelligence and natural language,

because it encompasses so many things that are difficult to quantify. It contains a lot of cultural context around like the types of things that people tend to find funny and those often vary culture to culture. And yet it still has to kind of make sense, which is the, you know, arguably the least quantifiable and hardest thing to really get your head around. So yeah, I mean, I would definitely argue, you know, like, if we've been able to solve humor, that is in many ways the hardest problem. So again, I think, like, there's clear, like, utility to humor, but I do think there's some nuance around, like, when it's appropriate to use it and when it's not. So, and I think even,

like, in these human designed, like, experiences, that's still, like, being figured out, honestly. So watch the space. Yes, definitely watch. the space. That's Vinith Misra. He's a computer scientist at the video game company Roblox. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, humorous. So so far, computers can't use humor on command,

but let's be honest, many humans can't either. Sometimes humor needs to be taught. Yeah, it's not about being funny. it's just about having this mindset of levity. And levity can be especially useful in tough times at work. So it's March 2020. Connor D.Manyoman is the co-CEO of a large nonprofit. And his organization has just moved to being fully remote.

This is Naomi Begdonis. She consults with CEOs like Connor, who was leading his first virtual meeting. So all of the employees are two-intoshy-interested. faces on a screen, and this is a really new thing for this entire culture. People are exhausted, they're scared. It's a really tense time. Conner wants to be inspiring. He wants to show care, but he's not quite sure how. So he's presenting, and he's saying the remarks that he had prepared, and he's having that moment that we've probably all had when we're reading prepared remarks, where we realize they are completely falling flat. And especially in this moment, he's

realizes he's just not saying the right things. So he makes a split-second decision. Connor ends his remarks, but he intentionally continues to share his screen. The entire organization watches terrified as Connor opens up a Google search and types in things inspirational CEOs say during hard times. And everyone loses it. He had a couple people reach out to him and say it was the first time since the start of the pandemic, since all going to remote work, that they had seen a screen full of smiles. Laughter can keep a crucial moment from turning into a crisis. As a business consultant, that's what Naomi teaches her clients.

It's also what she teaches her students. I am a lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, the co-author of Humor Seriously with Jennifer Ocker. That's Jennifer Ocker, the behavioral psychologist. I'm an academic. I'm also a mom, really good friend. Together, she and Naomi have been studying how humor can be a tool in business, like that moment when Connor poked fun at himself in front of his entire staff. So when he does this very simple thing, it has such a significant set of benefits.

Number one, we know from the research that leaders with a sense of humor, any sense of humor, the bar is so low. But they tend to be somewhere between 25 and 30 percent more motivating and admired. And then teams, teams that report to leaders like Connor, they are more engaged and satisfied at work, are also more creative. And if you think about this too, it's free. We're living in a time right now where there's such dramatic distrust. And that small, easy, free thing that Connor did enabled him to really become the leader that he wanted to be in this moment that was really hard. In a minute, we visit Jennifer and Naomi's classroom and hear what it sounds like to practice making people laugh. On the show today, humorous.

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It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Mnuch Zamorodi. On the show today, humorous. We were just hearing from Naomi Bagdonis and Jennifer Ocker. They're authors of the book, Humor, Seriously. And they teach a class at Stanford Business School called Humor Serious Business. So, this is a picture of me when I was five. Cute, right?

Yeah, no, that girl's a power-hungry little monster. We have to admit to be a CEO. We take students all the way from understanding the behavioral science of humor to learning techniques from comedians for finding more humor in their lives. And I turn and I'm like, Austin, can you drive? And he like, wakes up for a second and yawns. He's like, back pains the state of mind, bro. Naomi and Jennifer believe humor is a teachable skill

and something that their students need to practice in front of their people. peers. You're all probably thinking only an idiot would ever come back to school. Well, I'm back. I have to make a confession, which is that when I was like, heard about your class and saw your talk, I was like, who are these loser MBA students who have to take a class, how to be funny? I want to try and understand. I guess I just thought, like, either you got it or you don't. Talk to me about this. I would first and foremost like to say that our MBA students are so funny. and so cool. Not losers at all. Right. Noted. But, you know, a lot of our students experience what I personally did as well,

which is that we go to work and then we bifurcate our lives. We think we have to be a certain version of ourselves at work to be seen as professional and successful. And we have to be serious all the time to be taken seriously, especially when we're junior in our careers. And we start to feel like we're leading a double life. The research shows me, people are laughing much more on weekends than they are during the weekday. So part of this is helping our students tap into something that we all want more of. How do we create environments where joy just comes more easily? And the second thing is helping our students recognize that this isn't just about you being the creator of humor. It's about cultivating environments where humor can

come from anywhere. Naomi Bagdonus and Jennifer Ocker continue from the TED stage. Here's the secret. Don't look for what's funny. Just notice what's true. We ask some of you what's true in your own lives, and here's a few things we heard. Since working from OM, I only comb the front part of my hair. I only like my own kids. There I said it. So this is not about becoming a comedian. This is about looking at the world in a different way. There's a psychological principle called the priming effect that says, In essence, we find what we choose to look for. So when we live our lives on the precipice of a smile,

we shift how we interact with the world, and in turn, how it interacts back. It's also about being human, which should be easy because we are human. But at work, it's oftentimes harder than we think. In a recent survey, people were asked what traits inspire trust in a leader? One of the top responses speaks like a regular person.

When work gets serious and life gets busy, we become transactional. And yet these small shifts are enough to move us from transactional to human. You know, I remember when I started to relax at my first job because I started to feel more confident in my abilities and my superiors being like, huh, you talk. You're interesting. You're kind of funny. And I was like, well, yeah, I didn't have anything to say before because I was scared I was going to do something wrong all the time. So how much of this having humor at the office really about when you have power and that you feel that you have permission to be yourself. Yes. Definitely we find that as you increase in power and status in the organization,

you do have more flexibility in using it. Now, self-deprecating humor is really interesting because it's one of those things that if you use it with lower levels of status, it can actually boomerang and you land in ways that are maybe more insecure. Whereas if you have higher status, people attribute you greater confidence, confidence, you seem more human. Right. So that's one thing to note. I'll give one quick example of that. Please, yeah.

Pretty early in my career, I was facilitating a team dynamics workshop for this executive team. And most of the people in the room were 15 to 20 years my senior. And most of them were men. So here I am, this sort of young woman. I've got my hair in a high bun to try and look older. I'm like wearing my best madman outfit in my min. in my mid-20s.

And I have prepped so hard for this session. The most senior person in the room was a guy named Craig. Craig was posturing all session. He had his hands behind his head. He was disengaged. He just wasn't really in it. And so in the middle of my session, I was literally mid-sentence. Craig cut me off.

And he said, can you just cut to the part? where you teach me how to make my teams do exactly what I want. And the room stiffened. Everyone looked at me to see what I would do. And without thinking, I sort of playfully shot back. That's a great question, Craig. You're actually thinking of the workshop that I run on mind control. And that one's next week.

You're welcome to join that one. And I did not mean to say this. I had been doing improv on the side. I thought I was going to lose my job, basically. But the exact opposite happened. The room erupted in laughter and then everyone turns back to Craig to see what he's going to do. Craig took his hands from behind his head. He was smiling for the first time all day.

And he said word for word, I kid you not. I respect you. You can continue. I said, thank you. I was planning on it. And I went on. But it was this incredible moment. And by the way, Craig ended up becoming a real advocate of me.

But it was this moment of status matching, really. Yes. What I did was a really sharp sniper comment. And that, especially as a lower status person in the room, is what's going to gain you status. So I think it also speaks to this point of knowing whether you need a power move or a moment of connection or a moment of creativity or a moment of resilience. Okay. But there are risks, though, right? I mean, a sharp comment like that, it could fall flat or at the very worst, it could offend someone.

What then? Yeah. So I think there's a really important distinction here. There are different types of failure. We think that a humor fail is when we don't get a laugh. Actually, there's some awesome research to show that as long as our humor is still appropriate, then it'll still increase people's perceptions of our confidence and have no meaningful impact on competence or status.

So failing and getting crickets is actually not as bad as we think. Often the best thing to do is to just name it. Just recognizing that joke failed shows confidence and will often get a laugh of recognition. Now, if you fail and you offend someone, that's obviously a very different thing. But I think this doesn't have to be overcomplicated. The real thing to know is a humor fail is an empathy fail. And so understand what did you miss, especially if you offended someone, what did you miss and what can you learn from it? And then step three, make it right.

Jennifer, I wonder. if you feel that humor has changed a lot over the past few years. I mean, what's funny to one generation or group of people is not to another. It's enough to scare a lot of folks into not venturing to make any jokes at all. Yes, it's so true. But, you know, the idea is like, what is the distance? You know, how close are you to the thing you're making fun of? So instead of asking yourself, am I saying this next thing in order to be funny? ask yourself, what is needed in that moment is the diffusion of tension, et cetera. Humor is one of the best antidotes to arrogance because if anchored on the audience and reading the room, it has this real opportunity to uplift. But you need to take that perspective going in. You know, I think some people listening will feel that they do all this intuitively. And maybe

other folks, I'm sure, are listening very closely to your tips. But I want to know, like, what about your students, what is the hardest part of this class, would you say, for them? Sure. So our students' final project is a signature story from their life, and it should be a story that's meaningful, infused with levity. And inevitably, when they bring in their drafts, they are all just funny stories from their life that don't have any meaning. My name is Evan Mehan, and I am 23 years into serving a lifetime ban from the Carroll County Public Library. They bring in these drafts and we read them. We're like, okay, great job, great job.

Now throw them all away. Pick moments in your life that are important, that are meaningful, that shaped you, and then infuse levity into those stories. Now to understand my sentence, you have to understand that I grew up in a foster family with 19 siblings. So my family had to get really creative with child care, and I had to grow up fast. When I was four years old, my mother enrolled me in daycare at the library. The only problem was they had a strict age limit of six and older. Those librarians were on to me immediately.

In my reading circle, I was the smallest, worst-behaved, and most conspicuously illiterate child in the room. Looking at these difficult moments from our lives and choosing to have a little bit of them be comedies. That is a really hard thing to do, and it's a muscle that we work. So despite this setback, I continue to live as the oldest version of someone my age. I'm 27 years old now, and if you haven't noticed, I'm rocking the dad bod pretty hard. And I've raised money to try to buy a company from a retiring owner. That's right, people. My job when we leave here is literally to date old men. So if any of you know any old business owners, I'd love

the connection. I'm happy to meet them anywhere except for the Carroll County Public Library. Our life is just our remembered stories and we have more agency than we think to choose the genre. Of course, that's not always possible. And sometimes it's absolutely impossible. But I think that's That's part of the mission that we're on is to recognize that we have more agency about the stories that we create in our lives and the stories that we tell about ourselves. That was Naomi Bagdonis and Jennifer Ocker. Their book is humor. Seriously. You can watch their full talk at ted.com.

On the show today, humorous. And I promise, this is the last joke I'm going to make. What do rocket science and stand-up comedy have a lot? common. It's our next speaker, Kasha Patel. Kasha applies the scientific method to stand-up and uses humor to teach. Here she is on the TED stage in 2018. I write jokes about science. And I've been doing comedy for a while, and I realized stand-up comedy actually has a lot of qualities that can make science more approachable for people who think it's boring or don't care. How do I know this?

Well, I actually analyzed over 500 of my jokes. And it took a long time. I had one volunteer helper and bless his soul because not all of my performances were winners. And even I cringed at them. One of the things that I measured was how long a premise took to take and then how many seconds of laughter it produced.

I did this to figure out what kind of impact the joke had on the audience. I also categorized my jokes as science or not science, and it turns out that only a quarter of my jokes are science jokes. But this small percentage actually had the biggest impact out of all of my jokes. If you looked at my jokes overall, my science jokes actually performed 40% better than my non-science jokes. I wanted to know why.

Why did the audience respond so much to my science jokes? jokes. In my experience, people aren't really that enthused to hear science jokes and they're about to have a night on the town. I remember one time I was in this obscure gig that was at a seafood restaurant turned comedy club and people were so rowdy because it was there Friday night. And I went up there and I said as cheerly as I could. I said, who likes science? And there was this one guy in the front row who said, do we look like a crowd that like science? And I was like, what did I get myself into? But during the daytime, I actually work as a science writer at NASA. So I saw this and I took the challenge. Okay, sir, I get why you don't like science. It can be overwhelming and you don't know

what is true. But my job as a science writer is to help distinguish the difference between fact versus myth. Fact. You can get chlamydia if a koala scratches you. Myth, your wife will believe you. Some men were clapping too hard

of that. This is actually my most successful science joke. It has a short premise and it produces about seven and a half seconds of laughter on average. I wanted to sneak attack the audience with science.

If I can use comedy to draw you and then, yeah, I'll slide in a science factor too. I know what you're thinking. People want to go to a comedy club, not a lecture. But I actually think the emphasis of truth in my jokes actually makes my comedy more special and memorable. And I think it's because science and comedy are kind of an odd couple, right? We trust scientists. The Pew Research Center did a survey that said public confidence in scientists is actually high compared to other groups. And then on the other hand, you have comedians who are known for stretching the truth to get a laugh. Think about Rodney Dangerfield.

Now, when you combine these two things, though, I think they actually have a lot of traits that can help each other out. Science is about the discovery of truth, and my comedy is about communicating that truth while entertaining. I read about a recent research project where these Students actually created this condom that can detect an STD. It's actually coated with antibodies, so when it comes into contact with an STD, it actually glows a different color. So if it's green, it might be herpes.

If it's yellow, it might be chlamydia. If it's blue, it might be on too tight. So many people Google that premise. And then come up to me afterwards and say, Kasha, your joke was correct. If I can entertain and inform you, that's great. But if I can motivate you to look up something that I said later, I feel like that's a win for the science field. When I show people my charts and my Excel sheets, people say, oh, you're doing the science of science comedy. And even though I'm not a practicing scientist, I realize that I am using a lot

of the critical thinking skills that I used when I was a chemistry student. Finding a way to combine your passions can lead to a unique path and help you find the most authentic version of yourself. I combined science and comedy and found my preferred method of science communication and how I can be a science comedian. Find yours. Thank you. That was science writer and stand-up comedian Kasha Patel. You can find her full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for humoring us with this humorous show this week. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier,

and Fiona Guren. It was edited by Rachel Faulkner, Katie Simon, and me. Our TED Radio production staff also includes Ramel Wood, Diba Motisham, and Catherine Seifer. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feeleyn, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.