NLP Modeling - The gift of laughter
- Have you heard the expression ‘laughter is the best therapy’?
- Do you enjoy a really good ‘belly laugh’?
- Would you like to see me humiliate myself very publicly?
I feel that the ability to have a really good laugh the most important thing for a healthy and happy life. If you find yourself being a bit humourless watch out – you may be being a bit too ‘single minded’.
From a professional point of view, laughter is fascinating to me. Apart from being a tantalising mystery of human interaction, it’s an important topic because:
- of the ‘Patch Adams’ factor - people who laugh when they are unwell get better quicker than those who do not.
- a joke is a re-frame that adds flexibility; to find something funny you need to perceive something two different ways simultaneously.
- from my therapy work I can assure you that introducing humour is one of the most effective ways to change a client’s state quickly.
Scientists have only recently begun working with laughter. The field of study is called GELOTOLOGY. I’ve been reading on the subject ferociously for about a year and, whilst it’s very interesting, not much of it is useful.
Neuroscientists are doing a great job at identifying the physiological processes involved in laughter (with a bit too much emphasis from the neck up). Whilst I find neuroscience agreeable, coding laughter in this way is unlikely to empower us with more understanding of how to provoke people into laughter.
Psychologists are asking their usual flawed or ridiculous ‘why? ‘ questions and philosophising about the unobservable by guessing ‘content’ based explanations and then empirically proving them.
In my opinion there is only one group of people that can really help us with the question of laughter that will provide us with something practical: Comedians. They may not be able to explain it explicitly, buy they have a tacit knowledge – a feel for what is funny and what is not - a result of hours of live audience feedback that comes from years of road-time.
I doubt that great comedians are evaluating if they think something will be funny or not during live performance - if they were it would be impossible to get into a comedic state – a state of quick-thinking genius that allows them to be sensitive to an audience and respond quickly.
If we can develop a description of the patterns that emerge from this high-performance state, the therapeutic advantages would be profound.
This is my mission in NLP modelling…
During 2009 I will be using modelling three comedians, assimilating their style, creating my own act using their style and testing it on ‘open mic’ evenings. When I am able to improvise and respond to an audience in a way that gets the same results as the modelled comedian, I will codify the patterns.
I’m shitting myself. The idea is of stand up is scary to me – which is a bloody good reason to do it as so few activities get anywhere near pushing my comfort zone.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I look forward to following this one!
yeah, me too! ha ha ha (see, I am laughing….it’s all good!!)
by the way….I think you’ll do great Daryll! Go for it!
Crikey. Who are you modelling? Boardman, Manning and Dodd? Get me an invite to that show!!!
Brilliant Daryll !!!!! shitting yourself indeed.
Its a tough test to take. When traveling in the USA I always got to a Comedy Store. Most memorable visits were in LA (Sunset Strip) where Whoopi Goldberg and Eddie Murphy started. It is said that they still pop in unannounced as do other stars who are not comedians but want to play.
The audience’s at these places are usually fair and you have to earn your spurs. Great state control and natural wit are the order of the day.
I watched one guy from a TV show (think it was Friends he was a producer or something) just get it so wrong and was hung drawn and quartered.
In NYC I was lucky enough to see Jackie Masons daughter off Broadway who also bummed out.
I then taped and reviewed the behaviours that happened just before the audience laughed. There is a pattern that I have observed in Comedy Stores based on perceptual positions. There is one (of the 3 positions) that correlates with laughter at these places. I will not tell you unless you want to know. You could figure it out for yourself but I can give evidence of comedians and the ones you are modeling I bet have this pattern.
Nice project and great skill. You have that dead pan look of Jack Dee sometimes and strong wit beneath the surface. I for one would love to witness your progress, let me know when you are going to be on stage over the project timeline.
Love to know who the models are?
Daryll- you’ve been making me laugh for years… your natural, happy predisposition must already have a positive affect on those you’re working with - so I’m excited to see where this one’s going.. more happiness from Daryll? Can we take it
The best thing about this project (for me), is that, in parallel with the difficulty mentioned about comedians knowing this stuff tacitly but without a model or set of rules, it’s very hard to define what “comedy” actually is. The classic quote is “comedy = tragedy plus time” but this is only a small part of what is considered funny. The ridiculous is funny, but there is no way one can relate Peter O’Toole arriving on the Letterman show on a camel (seriously, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K561m7Nq7kk) back to a previous tragedy. (OK Lawrence of Arabia may have been a tragedy in the theatrical sense but that doesn’t count). In comedies of manners, be it Borat, The Office, or Rising Damp, the tragedy is occurring right now and it is the scrotum-tightening embarrassment of someone’s social interaction that is what makes it funny. Wordplay is funny but rarely tragic. And stand-up comics usually cover one or 2 of these styles, but not all. So choosing 3 similar comics gives a better chance at modelling what they are doing (basic scientific method, that), but won’t answer the whole question. Modelling 3 totally diverse stand-ups could neutralise the overall, or could create the greatest comic ever seen. As we all know, “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid”.
I like the idea of Boardman, Manning and Dodd though: “this black bloke was tickling my olympic gold pursuit medal…”
Defining comedy - not sure that our language can do it justice - there are too many variables. The process description that I am leaning towards (and it’s a work in progress) is that it occurs when the ‘left brain’ internal representation (that being the explicit meaning or the conscious intention/expectation) is at odds with (different to or the opposite of) the ‘right brain’ internal representation (the metaphoric or the environmental VAK experience). Holding these two representations simultaneously provokes a little ‘brain orgasm’ as the different representations collide accross the corpus callosum (excuse the use of the left/right metaphor). Physiologically - the ‘reaction’ - although this seems simultaneous so i’m reluctant to impose a cause-effect or temporal ordering, is a contraction of the diaphragm (expulsion of air) and a softening of the physiology that I would describe as a release of muscle tension. It is my current opinion that the process of laughing (the increase in oxygen and the release of tension) is a high-performance state.
All very interesting if you are a nerd like me, but not very funny.
In such a dark world, we need more laughter. Someone mugged a midget outside my office today. can you believe it? The world has real problems - How could anyone stoop so low?