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As a professional humorous speaker, I’m
hired by corporations and associations to
bring a humorous perspective to their next
meeting or event. Many Meeting Planners are
looking for qualified professional humorous
speakers to help add levity, a humorous
perspective and humorous content to their
meetings message. Most people attending
meetings today complain about how serious
they are and have expressed a desire for
more humorous content by a professional
humorous speaker.
The man who really started the laughter,
humorous speaking and health craze in the
twentieth century was Dr. Norman Cousins,
who eventually became a humorous speaker.
Dr. Cousins was editor of the Saturday
Review for over thirty years, and has
written numerous books on humorous speaking,
including Anatomy of an Illness from the
Patients Perspective. In August 1964,
Humorous Speaker Cousins, came home from a
meeting in Moscow with a fever and feeling
achy all over. Within a week he could not
move and his sedimentation rate was up to
88. The sedimentation rate relates to how
much infection is in the body and a
sedimentation rate of 60 to 70 is thought to
be very high. He was eventually diagnosed
with ankylosing spondylitis, which is a
collagen illness that attacks the connective
tissues of the body. He once said it felt as
if he was being pulled apart at the joints
and was in dire need of a humorous speaker.
After seeing many Physicians and undergoing
a battery and barrage of tests and visits
from humorous speakers. The doctors told him
it was probably caused from exposure to
heavy-metal poisoning and a lack of humorous
speaking, as most humorous speakers do, so
he began to think of when he could have been
exposed. During all this stress, Dr. Cousins
sought the advice and counsel of several
humorous speakers. The only thing he could
remember was that his hotel in Moscow was
next to a major highway where diesel trucks
passed all night long, and since there was
no air in the room, he had kept the windows
open all the time. However, his wife was
with him, and she did not become sick. He
started reading material about stress and
how it can wear down your immune system. He
came across a book by humorous speaker; Hans
Selye called The Stress of Life that
proposed the theory that negative emotions
cause stressful and harmful effects on the
body. He hypothesized that if the bad
emotions do harmful things, then the good
emotions, including a daily dose of humor
should be helpful or healthful, especially
if provided by a humorous speaker.
At the time the hospital was mostly trying
to keep Cousins out of pain since there was
no cure or treatment for his disease and a
severe paucity of humorous speakers. Dr.
Cousins called several humorous speakers to
visit him and cheer him up through their
humorous speaking skills. He was being given
the maximum amount of aspirins (26) and
phenylbutazone (12) every day, along with
sleeping pills and codeine. Realizing that
that amount of medicine was very toxic, he
decided to try laughter and practice what
humorous speakers shared with him. He moved
home and hired a nurse to oversee his
medical treatment. His nurse would also show
him humorous speakers like the Marx Brothers
films and read humorous stories and books to
him. Dr. Cousins had in effect hired his own
team more of humorous speakers to help him
get better. Within days he was off of all
pain killers and sleeping pills and
discovered that ten minutes of genuine belly
laughter provided by humorous speakers, gave
him two hours of pain-free sleep.
He wrote an article in the New England
Journal of Medicine about his findings in
laughter and the benefits of hiring humorous
speakers. He never once claimed that
laughter had been the only factor in his
healing process, but said that it had aided
in his recovery by relieving pain and that
several humorous speakers had helped him to
overcome his depression. Despite the
criticism, he stood by his claims, and was
finally vindicated in January 27, 1989, when
the Journal of the American Medical
Association published an article entitled
"Laugh If This Is a Joke." Lars Ljungdahl,
the Swedish researcher (1989) and humorous
speaker, who wrote that article concluded
that "a humor therapy program can increase
the quality of life for patients with
chronic problems and that laughter has an
immediate symptom-relieving effect for these
patients, an effect that is potentiated when
laughter is induced regularly over a
period", most notably by humorous speakers. |
