Save the world one Dad joke at a time
[Applause]
hello fellow pixel people
and for those of you watching this in
the future welcome back to the pandemic
right now the world has a lot of
problems and
we have to solve them i believe that a
good place to start
is by laughing back in april of 2020
when our cold reality was starting to
set in my fellow cheese club members and
i
were trying to tackle some of those
problems the cheese related ones
and yes you heard right i am a member
and the vice president
of the cheese club at binghamton
university
we were trying to figure out how we
could operate virtually
because unfortunately you cannot eat
virtual cheese
we tried brainstorming brain writing
mind mapping etc
with some success but after a while it
seemed like we hit
a wall and our energy seemed to dim
so i said something that i thought would
be funny to brighten the mood
i said y’all hear me out we hire
a goat we give it a cute little outfit
and parade
parade it around campus like a show pony
we pimp it out maybe even live stream it
i said this as a joke i didn’t think we
could actually do it
since it’s something we had never done
before
but after the initial laughs we wondered
what was stopping us
from bringing a goat to campus and so
we did there she is
in all of her glory it was the most
successful event we had done
all year we’re doing it again this year
and this time we’re making
t-shirts so
i know what you’re thinking you have
goat to be kidding me
yeah i am not a professional comedian
but me trying to be funny during that
ideation session
worked out pretty well right now a new
idea
is more powerful than ever due to
improvements in technology
the world is changing rapidly some of
the top jobs in demand right now
are jobs that did not even exist a
decade ago
and as technology continues to improve
exponentially
our education systems may not be able to
keep up with these new fields
and in the industries that already exist
businesses are adapting
every day every business is looking
for the next new idea that is going to
give them a competitive
advantage in an ever-changing world
so how do you become the
idea person well i only have a few
minutes
so let me talk about where you can start
i say start by working on your
humor what is being funny
essentially when being funny you’re
connecting two things
in an unexpected and creative way
otherwise known as
incongruity theory for example
why did the chicken cross the road
because the chicken behind it didn’t
know how to socially distance properly
thanks for the pity laugh
connecting the chicken to the pandemic
usually the joke is about something
people care about and
if done right it leaves your audience in
a better mood
and more interested if the joke is
successful it demonstrates
that not only do you understand the
issue at hand but also
that you can get into the mind of your
audience
which is all these things are extremely
important for ideation
humor can retrain your mind to
understand things and
see them in a new perspective by
increasing your ability to connect
we see this phenomenon in a study
conducted by barry quatrolowitz at mit
the researchers had students
professional designers
and improv comedians come together and
do a cartoon caption humor test and a
product design test
the comedians generated 20
more ideas than the professional
designers
and those ideas were rated 25 percent
more creative
they discovered that the games the
improv comedians used to practice
could be easily adapted to generate
design ideas
because they promoted associative
thinking
which increased idea output by 37
percent when implemented
humor also has a way of being able to
identify problems
superiority humor the type of humor that
focuses
on mistakes like this stand-up routine
about how bad airplane food is
usually can identify problems
whether it’s directed at the comedian
other people
or other things and somebody who is able
to
identify problems has a better chance at
solving them
so humor and ideas can go hand in hand
now comes the time to ask yourself are
you
funny do you think that other people
think that you are funny
do you think that i’m funny and it’s
okay if you said no
to any of those questions i get that dad
jokes don’t float everybody’s goat
boat the important thing to remember
is that humor is a skill something that
if you intentionally work at
you will eventually improve on and if
you really feel that being funny is not
in your wheelhouse
at all you can also be a facilitator
of humor for example you
can laugh you can audibly
show your appreciation when someone says
something funny
or better yet you can contribute by
sharing a relevant tick tock or internet
meme
this may seem small but it can help to
build an environment
that rewards creativity encourages
others to participate
and can leave your listeners in a
generally better mood
research conducted at northwestern
university found that simply increasing
the mood
of volunteers by having them watch a
comedy film increased
their likelihood of having a coveted aha
moment they were better at solving a
word association puzzle
than the volunteers who had watched a
horror movie or a boring lecture
humor in group settings has its benefits
there as well
for example telling a joke can quell
general anxiety
and help to remove mental blocks
and in group ideation sessions it can
help build group cohesion
and combat group performance anxiety
whether you’re in a group or alone with
yourself
anyone can be funny and everyone can
participate in humor
not just class clowns and comedians and
on that note
we are much less alone than you might
think and that is because of something
that we all
have the phone our generation
gen z has had the privilege and
the curse of growing up with a super
computer
in our pocket and this has created one
of
our most defining characteristics one
could argue and that is
our brand of humor if you go to youtube
or twitter or reddit or any social media
you will find a community
of people of strangers from across the
world
one-upping an already funny joke into
something that is
cry-worthy hysterical by being wildly
creative
from tick-tock trends to reddit threads
i
have attempted to demonstrate that here
today
by gathering a group of my friends and
having them scroll through my camera
roll
to find a photo and coming up with a
funny caption
so this is the photo that they chose
which i thought was a great start
because it looks like my soul
is leaving my body so i’ve censored
their names with gamer tags
so anonymous seahorse 34 responded with
that moment after the waiter says enjoy
your meal
and you reply you too
i relate to highly chilly slaps
responded with whoops i accidentally
sent that text to my mom
satin salad responded with when your
teacher assigns you 30 pages of writing
and all of your other teachers already
assigned 30 pages of writing
don’t even get me started and bootleg
teletubby
responded with when you’re forced to
listen to
another dad joke ouch
and then they made me into a clown
this is very reminiscent of what you
find on social media
you find people taking ideas and
contributing to make them better
even if it is just for a joke and don’t
get me wrong
the comment section can be a very scary
place but when people
begin to contribute in a rewarding way
something that may have started out as a
joke
might turn out to be a solution to a
real
problem one of my favorite examples of
this
is when tiktok creators took a single
video
and ran with it until it was a fully
fleshed out legitimate
musical a musical that raised
over a million dollars for charity for
entertainment workers
struggling in the pandemic this is just
one example of how our ability to share
and build on the ideas of others can
yield solutions
to real problems because of this culture
that we have created some can argue that
we may have
the most developed sense of humor of any
prior generation
and with some of the most significant
problems in human history
resting on our shoulders like the
climate crisis
systematic racism global public health
growing global poverty
etc who’s to say that we aren’t
also the best equipped to deal with them
and yes
these problems are a far cry away from
making somebody laugh but in doing that
in creating sharing connecting
we learn and we get that much closer
to real solutions so
start laughing start trying to make
other people laugh
and by the next time that you’re trying
to come up with the next revolutionary
idea that’s going to change the world
it’ll come to you thank you