Translator: Khanh Linh Nguyen Reviewer: Denise RQ
Judith, wonderful, but I'd like you all to do something now.
I can't see you
so I'm going to have to trust you to do it.
I want you to all smile, from here to here.
Come on! Smile!
Smile at your neighbors.
That might be -- I'm giving you a gift here.
This might be the last gift I give anyone as a European.
So smile
(Laughter)
please smile at each other.
How does that make you feel?
How does laughing make you feel?
Does it make you feel good?
Yes? I need response.
(Audience) Yes.
OK, so do you know what's going on in your body when you smile?
Do you know what's happening?
Even just smiling, rather than laughing, sends a signal to your brain
and increases those happy hormones, the endorphins
that are so essential to life.
They're absolutely the life blood of life.
Who here really likes a good laugh?
Nobody.
I actually can't see you so let's assume every hand is up.
Because if you don't like laughing, you're cutting off something very special.
You're cutting off
that whole emotional side of your life which is so important and so vital.
People that work, particularly people like Judith who work as midwives
I bet you, culturally, when they're all together,
in their little room, and they're all chatting about things together,
they're all having a really, really good laugh.
Because, actually, what's quite interesting
- and I work with women -
women's humor is very circular.
You know the symbols, the male and the female symbol;
the male of the species is very goal-focused.
Men use their humor literally to get a mate.
So it's all about sex, guys.
Women use their humor to communicate, to learn,
to pass on stories down their generation,
so they often use humor to build a mood, to help in the family.
I know, I'm a mother of two children, and I know that we do things
like we tickle our children to make them laugh
if they've hurt themselves;
and we make them laugh to make them feel better.
That's all about this wonderful hormone system
that we have within us.
I'm always quite upset by people who don't understand laughter
and just a very brief story:
I bumped into an old friend I hadn't seen for quite a long time.
I'd known her through the school days, our daughters had gone to school together,
and I hadn't seen her, I met her at a professional event,
and the first thing she said to me was rather aggressively,
"What are you doing here?"
I said, "Well, just like you really. I'm here to network, and how are you?"
Smile, you know, and the whole thing.
And I said, "What are you up to?"
And she said, "Are you still doing your comedy thing?"
I said, "Yeah, I am actually," and she said, "Oh, OK."
I said "Why don't you come along? You'd probably enjoy a good laugh."
"I don't like laughing," she said.
(Laughter)
As far as I'm concerned that was like cutting off her leg
because, emotionally, if you don't like laughing,
you are doing something absolutely horrendous to your body.
Somebody earlier talked about crying.
Crying is also very important because when you cry,
you are excreting negative hormones that are built by stress.
So those signs that you get, the comedy and tragedy signs?
You know the ones I mean? They're often used in drama.
They're very important
because comedy tips over quite quickly into tragedy.
So you have the two sides of your personality.
As we get older, we lose our filters,
so little children and animals do mad, crazy things
because they have no inhibitions.
Little children will laugh, little babies will laugh at anything.
You pull a silly face at a baby, and he giggles furiously.
That is because they've got no filters.
As we get older, and we learn more about life,
life gets in the way,
and we start to be inhibited,
and we reach a sort of peak of inhibition around our puberty years,
and we become quite embarrassed and self-conscious,
and we go through quite long periods
of not being able to laugh in the same way.
And then, as we get older, and we age, and we get a little bit more relaxed,
- and I'm getting older and a bit more relaxed,
and I laugh much more readily, I don't care anymore.
My inhibitions have dropped, and that's why we change.
I've talked a little bit about the purpose of laughter,
but it's so essential to me,
and one of the things that happened to me
was I was working in public relations, in marketing,
and I had a client who ran a comedy club.
He never booked any women, never.
I said, "Why don't you book any women?"
He just looked at me and said,
"Well, there aren't any women. Women aren't funny.
Women can't tell jokes. That's why I don't book them."
I had one of those light bulb moments, thinking, "I'll show you!"
Fourteen years on, "Funny Women," my company, run a competition.
I've probably seen nearly 3,000 new female comedy acts in 14 years.
We go from strength to strength.
We've run a competition that had 70 entrances in the first year.
We've just closed the entry for this year. We've had over 400 women entered.
One of the things that's come out
of working with comedians and female comedians
is the importance that equalizing just the comedy circuit has made
because if you apply that principle to other businesses,
and you start to actually bring women together with men,
you start to equalize the workplace.
Male comedians absolutely love the idea of funny women
and have been tremendously supportive,
possibly more supportive than established female comedians
because what we've given them the opportunity to do
by bringing more women into that place,
men can start to talk about things that emotionally affect them.
They would do different type of material.
It becomes less masculine and goal-focused,
it's not just about getting a laugh, it's about getting the feeling going.
Great comedy, you feel here; great tragedy, you feel here.
So it's really important that we brought that equal opportunity into the workplace
and I now go out and do that in businesses.
It helps with diversity, it helps with equalizing the male-female content,
it helps with LGBT, it helps with disability,
because actually, everybody has the ability to laugh,
apart from my funny friend who doesn't like laughing.
So, I think,
that's why comedy should be, literally, on prescription.
I think we should have a comedian in every workplace,
you probably have one.
There's bound to be somebody who thinks they're funny in the workplace.
if they're not, call them out by the way,
tell them they're not funny and go for it and be funny yourself.
It's all about improvisation, it's all about thinking on your feet,
it's all about telling a story
in an amusing, and natural, and humorous way.
We can all do it, like we can all smile,
and I really do think, and I really do believe
working as I do with thousands and thousands of funny women,
that actually, laughter is the best medicine.
If we all have a really good laugh, and I'd like you all to try laughing now.
That's hard, isn't it? I don't even have any jokes.
I'm not even a comedian, but-- there you are, you're laughing.
Once you laugh, you feel great.
So, that's my prescription for the future:
I'd like to see us all having more fun at work, enjoy yourselves,
tell your friends your jokes, share it.
Humor is really, really accessible now, just like you can download music.
You can download comedy from Youtube, you can see Mr. Bean,
you can see funny cats doing stupid things.
There is so much material for you to laugh at
so have a pause, have a break, show your friend a funny cat video,
and you will all feel much better.
So that's my recipe, go forth, and enjoy.
It's been a joy speaking to you. Thank you very much.
(Applause)