Comedy

A wise and beautiful woman once told me:

“Emotional resiliency and a great sense of humor is really sexy.”

Ok, well when you say it like that, now I’m listening.

But what if that doesn’t apply to me? I never give up, and I’m always laughing. I’m all set, thanks. Good to go, right?

Wrong. I was missing a key point…

We’ll get to emotional resiliency in another post, because that’s an intense topic and to be honest, I’m still trying to crack the code on being 100% indefatigable. For now, let’s ask our Intel Officer for the inside scoop on humor.

Turns out when the super-smart nerds researched the keys to happiness, a sense of humor was one of the major attributes that predicted who the happiest people were.

Boooooring! Of course.

BUT WAIT: they looked closely at four kinds of humor, and believe it or not, two of them actually predicted depression…

If you used humor to:

  1. make someone feel inferior, or
  2. to put yourself down, you were much more likely to isolate yourself from others and have a lower self-esteem. Also, the way you treat others is usually the way you treat yourself. Too much self-criticism and everything grinds to a halt. I’ve learned the hard way that being connected with others in a meaningful way is critically important to your happiness; the tendency for us is to push people away when we aren’t doing well. “I got this…” are famous last words of many an overconfident pilot…

You might be wondering, what were the ‘good two’? The two types of humor that wildly predicted happiness were: Self-enhancing (using humor to boost yourself up and make bad situations seem better), and Affiliative (comedy that builds the group up and encourages camaraderie). Take a peek at my favorite standup clips of all time and see if you can figure out which ones are which… until next time, make the most of every situation and stay alive no matter what.

[funny standup compilation video under construction – coming soon – in the meantime YouTube or start a Spotify/Pandora comedy channel and start exploring what styles you like]

* If you’re a veteran in need, please send me a message at dogfightDave@gmail.com if you’d like a free PDF copy of my book ‘Dogfighting Depression’. It’s not boring and I promise it doesn’t suck.

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