Humor has tremendous benefits for physical health, mental well-being, and your bottom line
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Judd Apatow told me that the Best Picture Oscar nominations irked him, because they’re all dramas, and all dramas are a lie. There’s a war, or a cancer, or a poor family in Seoul conning a rich family in Seoul by pretending they have skills they don’t have, which then gets really violent for reasons no one can remember. The characters react to these tragedies by yelling, crying, moping, and never making any jokes. Which is not how people act during war or cancer or probably the Seoul thing. It’s how people who have never experienced trauma assume they’ll act.
We don’t know how to act during a pandemic. So we’re putting on a character. We’re withholding our jokes out of fear that it will hurt someone who is experiencing COVID-related suffering, home-school-related suffering, end-of-democracy suffering, or have-to-pretend-to-be-amused-by-your-Zoom-fake-background suffering.
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails)