Making the Business World a Laughing Matter
Transcription of interview with Jim Richardson on May 14, 2012.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Jim Richardson teaches and coaches people how to deal with their business environment,
as well as other environments, with humor.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Richardson on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: I started my joke file because thatís what I learned from some of
the stuff that youíve written, and I kept trying to find humor in the world, but of
course Iím in the financial world and everything is just so funny here.
Jim Richardson: There are several ways you can do that and the best way is the way you
just almost alluded to there, and that is if youíre around your friends and you say
something funny, thatís natural humor.
It just comes out of the situation.
Itís not forced.
Itís not something out of a joke book or stolen from a movie.
Thereís nothing wrong with doing the stealing.
Everyone has to steal every once in a while, because when a speaker has to create a speech
in an unusual situation that they donít know about, they go to the joke books and look
them up by topic and see if they can find something desperately.
But if it comes out of you, thatís great.
First of all, your friends know you, but when you are presented to an audience, they are
not your friends.
It might be a work meeting, where you have a formal relationship with people.
It might be if youíre a business keynote speaker and youíre talking to a convention
of a thousand people, or youíre on the radio.
So then youíve got to frame it so that they understand.
Youíve got to give a big introduction to explain who you are.
You canít just start telling jokes right away.
The second part is the joke itself that you told in that informal situation.
Guess how long itís going to stay in your head, with the words in the correct sequence?
You can remember it for about 20 seconds, and itís critical to get the correct sequence
of words.
Obviously, you can have a little piece of paper that you write the words down on, and
that would take longer than 20 seconds, and the joke might be 30 words.
You canít write 30 words down in 20 seconds, but now with the smartphones youíre carrying
around, a recorder and sometimes a video recorder, you could record it right away.
This has two virtues: Not only do you get the exact verbiage if you record it within
20 seconds, but youíd also get the delivery, which is critical to how you mean the words.
But if you pull the smartphone out in front of your friends and start to record it, theyíll
yank it away from you especially if theyíre comedians.
Theyíll happily yank the smartphones away from you and start doing their act to your
cell phone, so youíve got to get away from them.
What is the one excuse you can use at anytime to get out of the room away from people?
Douglas Goldstein: Got to go to the bathroom?
Jim Richardson: Exactly, and there are hundreds in the audience and nobody fails to get that.
That was really funny that day.
Your friends are going to think you have a serious bladder problem.
You get in the bathroom, flip out the recorder, and record it, and if you have video, hold
it in your arms and you can get a shot of your face too because maybe your facial expressions
or maybe your gestures with your free hand.
If youíre right-handed, hold it with your left hand so you can see how you naturally
would move, and thatís going to be recorded for all time, and then you can go back and
memorize it.
Itís not about being shy.
We arenít as shy as we think we are.
The modern world makes us shy, but in the caveman days, everybody had to stand up and
talk so there was a lot more interaction.
I found when I was working with comics and hiring them in the African community, there
were a lot more comedians than in the Caucasian community.
So I asked a couple of guys and said ìDo all you guys go to church?
Is that the common denominator?î And they said, ìExactly.
We always are speaking from a younger age in front of people much more so than our Caucasian
contemporaries, so theyíre more intimidated.
Weíre not intimidated as we get to talk more at a younger age.î
There are two things here: The topic or the theme of what youíre talking about and the
technique you used to get the theme across.
I donít care what people talk about.
Iíve administered it and once you talk about stories from religion, or if I have a politician
or if I have a comic, or if I have a salesman, it doesnít really matter.
All the techniques are the same.
The thing that changes is the topic and the intent.
As I said, in a serious speaker the joke has to make some point, whereas with the comic,
he can just be entertaining and doesnít necessarily have to make a point, but youíre still selling
your idea and thatís the critical thing.
Douglas Goldstein: Do you think itís appropriate for people to use humor in the business workplace?
Jim Richardson: If you already know youíve done the process of getting that joke recorded
so you can transcribe it and learn how to tell it.
Once youíve done that, the very same day before 24 hours goes by, in an evening here
tonight, by tomorrow at the same time, you should have tried to tell it to 20 or 30 different
people offstage before you ever would do it in the workplace.
What if somebody doesnít know 20 or 30 different people?
Mix mingle, make friends, get in line at the post office, go from store to store, stand
in line telling your jokes buying nothing.
There are little potential audiences everywhere, audiences in embryo, and your jokes can bring
them to life.
After you tried it 20 or 30 times then you can do it in business because you know whatís
going to work.
Douglas Goldstein: Itís okay to be a joke teller.
People can still take you seriously.
As youíre positioned on this from what I understood from our last conversation, itís
the way of presenting ideas that helps people to be more receptive to them.
Jim Richardson: Exactly, and this of course has the provisory that you were a successful
joke teller and not the guy that puts the lampshade over his head at a party and everybody
laughs because heís just being childish.
Actually, your jokes have a point so people are going to listen because if they laugh,
theyíre resonating with you.
Itís like a tuning fork resonating.
Youíve automatically created a like-minded community that all agree on the same thing
because if they laugh, theyíve involuntarily agreed with your point.
Douglas Goldstein: Is it about actually making people laugh out loud, or is there some other
more subtle thing?
Jim Richardson: It depends on the joke.
Bill Rogers said that he didnít like jokes that got a huge laugh because itís going
to bring down the house.
He preferred the joke that got a lot of subtle response, maybe only a few seconds of laughter,
and in this way youíd nudged the person and theyíd even say, ìHeís right about that.î
Once theyíve brought down the house, people forget seconds after theyíve heard it, but
once it actually resonates with people and gives them some information, maybe they find
out they are angry about something they didnít know they were angry about, maybe they have
a hope or a fear that they didnít really know was there and this resolves it.
For example, people always think that you should tell jokes where you agree with the
audience, and thatís what we call conventional humor.
Thereís another kind of humor called a service humor in which you tell jokes that people
may or may not agree with, and you can take a convention and try to turn it around until
you make a point that is the opposite of what people generally agree about.
A great one at this was Oscar Wilde, and one of his great jokes was ìThe widowís hair
just turned gold from grief.î It took you a while to catch that one as opposed the other
one I was telling because you have to put in your head together whether her hair should
turn gray, turn gold, or why it would turn gold because the guy is dead, and now she
got all the money so she got a haircut and she is celebrating, but he said it so much
quicker.
Jim Winters appeared looking like General Schwarzkopf right after the First Gulf War
all in uniform and had a little riding crop pointing up at a screen behind him that said,
ìWeíre here.î Thatís all he had to do because he was being identified with the Schwarzkopf
character who had been explaining the war and pointing up to the graphs and the CNN
broadcasts.
If you panned around the room, youíd see the
audience is mouthing, ìThatís funny,î and not laughing, whereas the people with them
were laughing out loud.
If you know Don Rickles, heís somewhat controversial.
If you havenít seen him live, people donít always get it because it only works if he
can actually drag you up on stage and tell a joke at your expense, and this doesnít
always work on television quite so well.
It was wonderful when he worked the first row on Saturday Night Live, a weekly television
show here, and when I played that for my comics, I could see them all knocked in their heads
and they werenít saying thatís funny and I could really read their lips because they
are all saying the same thing: ìThatís how he does that.î
Douglas Goldstein: A lot of the comedy that you see is often about bringing someone up
on stage and actually making them feel bad.
I know one of the things you focus on is humor that is more fundamentally humorous without
actually being at the expense of a specific individual in the audience.
Jim Richardson: Yes, this is the difference between wit and humor.
Wit is a corrective comedy designed to bring people back into the fold, so youíre looking
for people who are being hypocritical and you want to humiliate them and get them to
behave themselves and to behave correctly, whereas humor is more of a loving thing where
youíre identifying with the eccentricity of somebody, loving them and kidding them,
so with attack humor embraces.
Douglas Goldstein: Could you just tell people how can they follow you or learn more from
you?
Jim Richardson: You can check my website, which is www.jimrichardson.com.
I have free tips on how to improve your delivery in real life, which is just the tip of the
iceberg, then you get to call me and become a client and really learn how to do stuff
and thatís very serious, very professional, and would be successful at the national level.
Of course, if youíre calling from Israel, we want you to be successful at the international
level, and that really helps to protect the image of the country and your businesses so
itís probably a good idea to do it.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
Disclaimer: This document is a transcription and/or an educational article.
While it is believed to be current and accurate, divergence from the original is to be expected.
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sole basis for making financial decisions.
The opinions rendered herein are those of the guests, and not necessarily those of Douglas
Goldstein, Profile Investment Services, Ltd., or Israel National News.
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