In this episode, Chris Duffy, author of Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy, discusses how humor can transform our relationship with life’s challenges, connect with others, and shift our perspective on difficult situations. He shares personal stories and practical tips for cultivating humor, emphasizing laughter’s role in resilience and well-being. The conversation covers the social power of humor, taking risks, and learning to laugh at ourselves.
Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!
Key Takeaways:
- The role of humor in coping with life’s challenges.
- The concept of shifting perspectives through laughter.
- The parable of the two wolves and its implications for personal growth.
- Distinctions between comedy, humor, and levity.
- Humor as a spiritual virtue and its importance in connecting with others.
- The social function of laughter and its role in building relationships.
- Practical strategies for cultivating humor in daily life.
- The therapeutic benefits of humor during difficult times.
- The idea of taking social risks to foster genuine connections.
- The transformative power of humor in reframing experiences and enhancing well-being.
Chris Duffy is an award-winning comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts the hit podcast How to Be a Better Human. You can watch his comedic TED talk, “How to find laughter anywhere” online. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC News, NPR, and National Geographic Explorer. Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas on HBO, executive produced by John Oliver. He’s the creator/host of the streaming game show Wrong Answers Only, where three comedians try to understand what a leading scientist does all day, in partnership with LabX at the National Academy of Sciences. Chris is both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student.
Connect with Chris Duffy: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Chris Duffy, check out these other episodes:
Humor and Healing with Josh Johnson
By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!=
This episode is sponsored by:
David Protein Try David is offering our listeners a special deal: buy 4 cartons and get the 5th free when you go to davidprotein.com/FEED.
Hungry Root: For a limited time get 40% off your first box PLUS get a free item in every box for life. Go to www.hungryroot.com/feed and use promo code: FEED.
IQ Bar: Text FEED to 64000 to get 20% off all IQBAR products, including the ultimate sampler pack, plus FREE shipping. (Message and data rates may apply).
If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon! Click here to learn more!!
Episode Transcript:
Chris Duffy 00:00:00 I think that we’ve all had this experience of you are going through something that is like driving you crazy, and then you talk to someone else who’s going through the same thing, and you both end up laughing about how awful it is because it’s like, I’m not alone. You get it. And it just makes you feel so much better.
Chris Forbes 00:00:21 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:06 Hey everyone! I’m someone who’s spent a lot of life trying to change circumstances. I have a book all about how we make changes, but there’s a realization that comes at a certain point that sometimes we can’t change the circumstance. All we can change is our relationship to it. And my guest today, Chris Duffy, who’s the author of Humor Me How Laughing More Can Make You Present Creative, connected and Happy, says this humor is a way of addressing reality while shifting our relationship to it. And I really love this idea because when we can’t change a circumstance, we can shift our relationship to it. And humor is a really valuable way to do it. It doesn’t erase the pain, it doesn’t pretend things are fine. It gives us a way to work with it. And I’ve often believed that if we were to list out the spiritual virtues, humor or levity would be one of them. He also says you can laugh at the very real facts of how bad things are, and it doesn’t change the underlying facts, but it changes the way you perceive them.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:15 That’s the nuance. It’s a perceptual shift. We also talk about this idea, and he says, looking on the bright side has this tinge of toxic positivity. Humor accomplishes a lot of the same stuff without pretending there’s nothing bad at all. And this is really critical. So this episode was really valuable to me, and I loved talking with Chris. He is a genuine funny guy, also very thoughtful. And this episode was one of my favorites and I hope you enjoy it. Hi Chris, welcome.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:47 To the show.
Chris Duffy 00:02:48 Thank you so much for having me.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:50 I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, which is called Humor Me How Laughing More Can make you present creative, connected and happy. And it’s a very fun book and I look forward to getting to it. But we’ll start like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there’s two bowls inside of us that are always at battle.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:11 One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Chris Duffy 00:03:36 Well, Eric, I think it’s a beautiful parable, and I’ve listened to so many episodes of your show, and I think that one thing that it’s always made me think is that we really should not be feeding wolves. Like, that’s just a dangerous piece of advice, 100%.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:49 You’re right, you’re right.
Chris Duffy 00:03:50 You really just don’t want the wolves to build an association with you and food, and then they.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:55 Get how many people.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:56 Been.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:56 Maimed by listening to this podcast?
Chris Duffy 00:03:58 That is right. Thousands.
Chris Duffy 00:03:59 You have encouraged thousands of people to feed wolves, which is a quite a dangerous behavior, both for you and for the wolves.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:05 So 100%.
Chris Duffy 00:04:07 Yeah, that’s my first really. My first takeaway is like, just let’s not feed even a good wolf, because a good wolf is still a dangerous wild animal.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:13 We have few squirrels inside of us. Can you feed squirrels?
Chris Duffy 00:04:16 I would say a domesticated dog, maybe. You know, there’s two golden retrievers inside of me. Yes. And I’m gonna feed them both because I love those dogs. Yes. But. Yes. So that’s my. That’s my initial reaction. The second one is, you know, I think that I like the idea that none of us is all good or all bad. I think that’s a really important lesson from that parable. And I think it has informed a lot of my work. Right. To just, like, be curious about people, to be curious about myself, and also to not take myself too seriously, to not get all up on my high horse of like, well, I’m just good and everything inside me is good, and there’s nothing bad inside me that could be cultivated as well.
Chris Duffy 00:04:53 For me, a lot of like comedy and humor comes from acknowledging the bad wolf inside of yourself, too. And I will also say, anyone who’s seen me physically, I do think that, All kidding aside, it probably is two golden retrievers inside of me instead of two wolves.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:07 Yeah, I mean, I agree, the thing that I love about the parable the most, probably besides the obvious, like your choices matter, is this acknowledgement, like we all have these different sides of us, obviously more than two. and that, I think is comforting because then when I’m like, well, God, I feel really greedy today, or I feel very envious today, or, you know, I just wanted to kill that person who cut in front of me in traffic today. I’m like, oh, that’s just what it means to be a human.
Chris Duffy 00:05:38 Totally. Like, ostensibly, I’m the one being interviewed and you’re the one doing the interviewing. But I really would like to ask you a question which is having done this show for so long, and you always start by reading that.
Chris Duffy 00:05:49 I’m curious, Like, not just what it means to you right now, but how has the repetition of that lesson? How has it changed your understanding of it over the years?
Eric Zimmer 00:05:58 I think it’s interesting. If I started today, I mean, I started the show 11 years ago. I don’t think I would pick that parable to start today because I am a decidedly non-binary person in like the way I view the world. Like, I’m a big middle way kind of guy, you know, and that just divides the world into good and bad. And it makes it sound like there’s easy categories. And I just think that’s nonsense. So in that way, I don’t know if I would choose it again, but it feels like a through line that matters to me. And I think the audience is used to it. I think the repetition of it for me has boiled down the simplicity of it. It’s easy to get into a lot of abstractions, and some guests do abstractions about what it is and what it means.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:49 But for me, it’s just boiled down the two things that resonated about it for me in the beginning, which is our choices really do matter. You know, and we have choice. And then just that second, like, we all have these competing elements inside of us, that normalization of the fact that we have competing forces in my in the book that I’ve got coming out, I’ve got a whole chapter on this idea of motivational complexity. We want and value and desire and need all sorts of things all at the same time. And that’s a pretty confusing state of affairs, and I don’t think there’s a way to make it go away. I love that I think we can recognize it and say like, okay, here’s what’s going on, and I have to prioritize and I have to choose. But the fact that I’m torn, I don’t think, at least in my experience, is not something that completely disappears in life, even if you’re clear on your values. Like, for me, I value this show.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:42 I value the work that I do. I value my friendships, I value my relationships, and sometimes those things are in conflict with each other. I don’t think there’s a way to eliminate that. And so for me, it’s just okay, recognizing that how do I work with it? And I think that’s the parable for me, is it just keeps reminding me of that core truth.
Chris Duffy 00:08:02 That’s really great. Oh, that’s such an interesting way of thinking about it. And I certainly relate to the idea that you don’t always get to a resolution. And there’s very rarely, like a definitive correct answer. yes. In in life’s actual challenges. I think that’s really, really fun.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:18 I wish it were that easy. Yeah I.
Chris Duffy 00:08:20 Wish. I always am like, I, I, I constantly want for someone to walk in and be like, by the way, I’m the grownup in the room that you’ve been looking for. And let me just tell you how things work 100%.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:31 Well, I’m significantly older than you.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:33 I am the grown up in the room, and I have the exact same feeling because life is always shifting. Like I turned 55 this year. I’ve never been 55. My body is changing. Like all of a sudden I’m in mean, we’re just constantly put into new situations throughout life, and so there’s no way to be like arrived because life keeps changing and so do we. Which is fun most of the time. Occasionally you’re like, for God’s sake, watch something. Just sit still for.
Chris Duffy 00:09:01 A little while. Yeah, it’s fun. And it’s also really uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I’m like, couldn’t he. I’d just be done. Like, it would be cool if I could do a weekend’s worth of laundry, just do all the laundry for the year over the weekend, and then I wouldn’t have to do more. But that’s actually not how it works.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:16 It is 100% not how it works. So I’d like to switch into your book, because we’re kind of doing part of what your book really is about, which is this idea of incorporating humor into our lives.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:30 We’re sort of joking a little bit about these difficult things in life, and I want to start with the distinction you make between comedy, humor and levity.
Chris Duffy 00:09:40 Yeah, this is a distinction that I find really helpful, and I was inspired to to have this distinction by Jennifer Acker and Naomi Baghdatis, to researchers who have studied humor and wrote a really great book about humor as well. And they basically say that, like comedy is the performance. Humor is the. Like day to day practice and levity is the mindset. So it’s like, how do you see the funny things around you? And then humor is like, how do you share them with other people? And then comedy is like, now you’re performing it on stage. And I think I kind of draw a little bit of like a fuzzier distinction there. Academics. So they have like a very clear line. For me, I think of it more as when if I tell you to imagine someone with a great sense of humor, most people imagine someone who is like standing up, giving a toast at a wedding and making everyone laugh, or they’re the person at the party who everyone has gathered around listening to a really funny story.
Chris Duffy 00:10:35 And I actually think that that’s not necessarily like that performative piece is fun and great when the person does that. But the thing that I really am into is the person who goes through their day with a lot of laughter, who sees something funny and laughs, who you want to be around because they laugh at your jokes, like the person who is really generous with that joy and that spirit of of laughter and levity. That’s what I’m trying to cultivate, and that’s what I really think, like the world desperately needs more of.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:01 I have a couple of thoughts on that. One is, the person who is editing this episode right now is my best friend Chris, and we started the show together 11 years ago, and I think he’s the funniest person I know, and he is always looking for the humor in every situation. Now I think with anything we can take that too far. And Chris, you do something. No I’m kidding.
Chris Duffy 00:11:22 Oh certainly I listen, I have I’ve been very guilty of it.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:25 We know I was referring to him as oh other.
Chris Duffy 00:11:27 Yeah. Oh no no no. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:28 Other Chris you’re you’re perfect.
Chris Duffy 00:11:29 Other Chris is horrific. Real a real monster.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:32 But you’re right. It’s just this always sort of looking for the humor in, in situations and.
Chris Duffy 00:11:38 Well, knowing that, can I just interrupt for one second to tell you that knowing that the person editing this has a great sense of humor, I gotta tell you, one of my favorite all time editing jokes, which is Bo Burnham and his special has a great joke where he says, like, you know, the thing about video editors is they’re so stupid that. And then it just cuts and goes to the next joke. So whenever I hear that an editor is funny, I’m like, please, like, you know, feel free to edit me out where I’m like, you know, the thing about Chris, the editor, he’s a total oh now skipped like ten minutes into the conversation.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:06 Perfect. The other is I’ve.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:08 I’ve often argued that when we list out virtues, we should be adding levity to the list. You know, like, it is a spiritual virtue, I think.
Chris Duffy 00:12:17 So there’s an incredible book that I. That I love, that I read many years ago, and I’ve given to so many people, and it kind of inspired me to want to write my book, which is called between Heaven and mirth. It’s written by Father James Martin, who is a bit of a Jesuit priest, and he’s hilarious. The book is like laugh out loud funny, but it’s about the role that laughter and comedy play in religion specifically Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But it also touches on others, and I think that people really do often think that, like laughter and levity mean that you are not serious. And I think that makes a really compelling case that actually these can be ways of accessing like profound truths. And to me, the parallel is like if you talk to a really genuinely smart person, a true genius, like someone who is making discoveries or doing scientific research that is changing the world, the one thing that always comes across is that they will tell you all the things that they don’t know.
Chris Duffy 00:13:13 Right. They are interested in the limits of their understanding. And and they’re not like they’re not attached to the idea that they’re a genius. They’re like, man, I don’t get anything about this. And I’ve studied it for years and I really want to know more. And I think humor is a way of kind of allowing us all to get into that place of like, I don’t have to be perfect. Instead, I can, like, acknowledge the imperfections and get to these profound places because of that.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:36 Yeah. I think that humor is a fundamental tool in working with reality skillfully. Like for me, like, I can’t imagine dealing with the world and reality and everything in it. Without humor, it doesn’t make sense to me. I guess on on one level, because you can’t imagine not being a way that you are. But I think about laughter, and the ability to laugh at yourself is so critically, you know, that’s another of your pillars, right? You talk about the ability to laugh at yourself.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:08 So say a little bit more about why why you find that valuable and why that’s useful for us as people.
Chris Duffy 00:14:13 Well, I think the ability to laugh at yourself is so crucial to my understanding of what it means to have a good sense of humor, because, like, let’s just start with think about people who, you know, who are willing to laugh at themselves. Those are so much more likable people, people who you want to spend time with. And when you think about a person who has no sense of humor about themselves, who takes themselves so seriously and won’t ever laugh or crack a joke. That’s a difficult person to be around. That’s kind of an insufferable person. Yeah, and I think that, like, the irony is that often people who are unwilling to laugh at themselves do think they have great senses of humor, but they’re just like, I’m, I. All I do is tell jokes about other people, or you better love me. I’m so fantastic. And that’s, again, the person that we want to be around is the person who goes like, oh God, is this is what I’m doing embarrassing.
Chris Duffy 00:15:00 Oh, I’m covered. I spilled mayonnaise all over my pants, and I’m at this party. And I just realized it like you much. Rather be around that person than the person who comes up to you and goes. By the way, I do 500 sit ups every morning, and I have a six pack, and I’m 75 and I’ve never felt better. You’re like, wow, that’s cool. But I’m I’m not. I can’t really relate. Yeah. That’s you know, when they’re like, I have $1 million. I have an incredible investment portfolio. I have a six pack. My child is going to Harvard. You’re like, wow, I don’t have anything to say to you. You know? And if someone comes to you and they go, like, I didn’t sleep at all last night because my baby was puking, and I just wanted to come to this party because I really, like, want to hang out with people. But I’m feeling so awkward and strange. That’s the first one where you’re like, we got something to talk about, you know?
Eric Zimmer 00:15:45 And I think it also it goes a long way towards learning to live with ourselves in a different way.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:52 Like, I am notoriously forgetful. Like, I won’t know where my phone is. I mean, I just, I lose things. I mean, I’m at the point where I’m like, what things matter to me? And can I get an AirTag on them? Right? Like, can you AirTag a hat? Yes you can. I can tell you I’ve got.
Chris Duffy 00:16:10 Can you AirTag love, Eric.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:11 Well, we were just in Lisbon recently and we were dog sitting and the first thing we did was AirTag that dog.
Chris Duffy 00:16:18 That’s incredible. That’s really incredible.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:20 And I did love that dog. So in one sense. But you know, I think I was talking to somebody yesterday. She was telling me about how she got this Christmas tree. She wired it all up. She was house or she was cat sitting for someone. And the cat started eating the electrical cord.
Chris Duffy 00:16:35 Oh, yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:35 And shorted out the whole tree. And we were joking about how that famous holiday vacation scene where the cat electrocutes itself.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:44 And we were. We were joking that, like the baseline for any sort of animal sitting is don’t kill it, don’t lose it.
Chris Duffy 00:16:52 Yes.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:52 And so we we AirTag that dog right away.
Chris Duffy 00:16:55 I electrocuted your cat with a Christmas light. Is is not really an acceptable response when they come home.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:01 Nicole, who works with me, sent me a video this morning of her sister’s kid and it was a video of Santa, and it’s got the three kids. One of them was a baby. Santa drops the baby.
Chris Duffy 00:17:12 Oh! Oh no, Santa!
Eric Zimmer 00:17:15 Which again, is like, I don’t know what the Santa rules are.
Chris Duffy 00:17:20 That’s got to be one of them.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:22 I mean, it’s almost one that you just don’t even reinforce because it’s so obvious. Yeah, that’s the bait.
Chris Duffy 00:17:27 That is like sometimes you go into a venue or a you know, a restaurant or something. And they’ll have a sign on the wall and you’ll be like, That’s such a specific sign. And, you know, it’s because someone did that thing.
Chris Duffy 00:17:36 You know, it’ll be like, whatever you do, do not dump the full pepper shaker into the toilet. And you’re like, that must have happened, because that’s not a thing that you put in other perhaps.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:46 More than once. Yes.
Chris Duffy 00:17:47 Yeah. And this one, now that mall has like a if Santa drops your baby, it is your own liability. Santa’s not liable for being holding babies correctly.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:54 Exactly. You can just sort of see the baby start sliding. Start sliding. Santa doesn’t really have it, isn’t getting it. Boom. And then the baby just starts wailing.
Chris Duffy 00:18:04 Oh, at least it was okay. But yeah, that is that is really bad.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:07 The baby’s fine. The baby’s fine.
Chris Duffy 00:18:09 You know, I have two young kids, and we we took our son to meet, like, a mall Santa for the first time. And, he’s not really familiar with, like, the concept of Santa yet, and so, like, he was really into the idea of sitting in this chair that was like a red decorated chair.
Chris Duffy 00:18:24 And then as soon as Santa tried to put his arm around the kid for the photo, my kid was like, who are you? Get that arm out of here. And Santa. It was so funny because he made Santa feel awkward. Where then? Santa was like, just, you know, I wasn’t. It’s just like, okay, I’ll put my arm back over here. It was really an incredible moment. We have a great photo of the Santa being like, I guess, no touching.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:01 Hey, friends, as you may have heard, I have a book coming out in March called how a Little Becomes a Lot The Art of Small Changes for a more Meaningful Life, and I am gathering together a book launch team. It’s a small circle of people who feel connected to the work and want to help it, to find its way to the people who need it. What being on the team is like is going to be pretty simple. It’s going to be sharing the book with someone who might come to mind, leaving a review if it makes sense.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:26 Sharing on social media. Whatever works for you. As we move closer to launch, we’ll have behind the scenes reflections, early access moments, special giveaways in a few ways for the team to connect along the way. We’ll have some fun, we’ll get to know each other, and hopefully we’ll get the book out there to more people. If you’d like to be part of this special circle, you can go to one UFI dot net help. That’s one you feed. Net help.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:53 Ironically, Chris, the editor of the show, and I were discussing what makes a good Santa the other day because he said a picture of his son with Santa. And I said, I mean, did you take zippy to a Christmas party at the methadone clinic? Like that is a rough looking Santa, And he was like, but the Santa was great. He was amazing. And so then we were like, well, what makes a good Santa? I mean, yeah, you know.
Chris Duffy 00:20:15 All jokes aside, I read like, an incredible, beautiful article about people who are Santas and how it changes them for the better.
Chris Duffy 00:20:21 It was like an incredible, really fun Christmas article about how it like has transformed these people’s lives to kind of approach the world in the way that we want Santa to approach the world.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:29 That’s very interesting.
Chris Duffy 00:20:31 Yeah, that’s actually very kind of like a little bit in the realm of this podcast. Like, which do you feed Good Santa or Bad Santa inside of yourself?
Eric Zimmer 00:20:38 Yeah. You feed Santa, do you feed the Grinch?
Chris Duffy 00:20:40 Yeah, exactly. There’s Santa. The grandmother turns the.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:43 Grinch for the.
Chris Duffy 00:20:45 Holidays. Yeah, there’s the holiday episode. Inside of you is a naked green man who lives in a mountain all alone, and also a large man who wears red and white and lives in an uninhabited continent. Making toys all year round.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:57 Is likely to suffer a stroke or a heart attack anytime in the next three months.
Chris Duffy 00:21:02 Yeah yeah yeah. Which one of them do feel.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:04 Like we’ve sort of touched on this? But this is a beautiful line that I wanted to hit. Humor is a way of addressing reality while shifting our relationship to it.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:12 It reverse engineers despair into hope.
Chris Duffy 00:21:14 Thank you. I think that this to me is why I think humor is so powerful, especially in times when things are overwhelming or bad, or seem kind of chaotic, is because I think it accomplishes a lot of the same stuff as like looking on the bright side, but looking on the bright side has this tinge of like, toxic positivity. Like there’s nothing bad at all.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:39 Yeah, exactly.
Chris Duffy 00:21:40 And I think the great part about humor is, like, you can laugh at the very real facts of how bad things are, and it doesn’t change the underlying facts, but it changes the way you perceive them. It shifts your mental experience of it. And so much of what we need to do when things are overwhelming is just shift how we’re seeing it. I talked to the comedy writer Simon Rich, who’s written all these incredible famous comedy things from Saturday Night Live to The New Yorker to all places, and he described it to me as comedy and horror. You write in the exact same way that you raised the tension to the maximum point, and the difference is that at the maximum point of tension, comedy relieves the tension.
Chris Duffy 00:22:19 It pops the balloon and it releases all of that, and horror just raises it until people start dying. And I think that’s true in our regular lives, too, right? If you get to this point of maximum tension and laughter and humor at this point of breaking, it can release that in a really positive way.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:35 I just had a little bit of an insight of a way to think about it. So one of the things I talk a lot about is perspective, how, you know, we never see the world as it is. There is no such thing, right? We always see the world through our own lenses and filters, and it’s really helpful to be able to pick up different lenses and look through different lenses, turn the object different directions. And I’m always thinking about like, what are ways to shift perspective? Like you can zoom out in time. You can. But another lens is humor. It’s like a whole perspective lens of its own.
Chris Duffy 00:23:09 Yeah. In fact, one of the, the alternate like titles, when I was originally coming up with the title for this book, was like the lens of humor or the humor mindset, because, okay, it so is the idea of like, how do you shift into this, this world? And something I really tried hard to do was to make the book really practical, so that it’s not just me being like, it would be great if you had a sense of humor.
Chris Duffy 00:23:29 You know, it’s like, okay, but how do I do that when I’m when I’m stressed and my boss is asking for something of me that requires me to stay awake till 2 a.m. and also I have family pressures and also the world outside is overwhelming. How do I actually laugh more? Because it doesn’t feel like a time when I can laugh a lot. I wanted to give people like practical ways to actually do that, and that’s because I do think that, like it is a skill that you can learn. It’s a muscle that you can build so that you are able to shift into that more. And, you know, just to give a practical way of like, I think that we’ve all had this experience of you are going through something that is like driving you crazy, and then you talk to someone else who’s going through the same thing, and you both end up laughing about how awful it is, because it’s like, I’m not alone. You get it, and it just makes you feel so much better, even though in some ways that doesn’t make any sense, right? Like, if I’m like, my car got a flat tire and it’s gonna ruin my whole week that I’m going to have to take this into the shop.
Chris Duffy 00:24:24 And then someone else goes, oh my God, my car got a flat tire too. That’s actually twice as bad. That’s not better. But it feels half as bad because now you can relate.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:32 It’s really interesting. There’s this idea in friendships and how friendships help us cope with things which we generally think they do. But there’s there’s something called the rumination trap, which basically means that as friends, you you egg each other on in the bad way. Oh, your boss really is a jerk. That’s really terrible that you felt that way. Like validation is important, but then you get stuck there. And humor is kind of the opposite. Yeah, right. It’s the opposite of co rumination. It’s co levity producing.
Chris Duffy 00:25:04 Yeah that’s so interesting. I’ve never heard that. And it makes total sense that this is a way to be there with each other but not focus on the negative. Instead focus on you know the absurdity of it. And so much of life is absurd.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:17 Yes, very much of it.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:19 So let’s shift into practical ways since you’ve kind of kind of led us there. Like give me a couple of practical ways that I could incorporate more humor in my life.
Chris Duffy 00:25:29 The most important one, I think, is also the most basic, which is just to notice what makes you laugh naturally, right? Like when you go about your day, or when you go about your week, or when you go about your month. What are things that make you laugh without trying? Right. Like, if you see a meme online and it makes you laugh, don’t just forget about that. Write that down, copy the link to it. Download the image. Like start a little like humor folder or a document where you’re tracking that if someone says something to you and it’s such a funny little story, write down the like one line version of the story. Right. Like Eric told me about his friend Chris and what happened with the Santa. Okay, great. Because then the thing is, we so often, like, think we’ll remember this really funny thing or this thing that we entertain and it just disappears from our mind.
Chris Duffy 00:26:15 But then when you are stressed and when you do want to access celebrity, it’s really hard to get into that mindset then to be like, okay, well, I’m feeling overwhelmed, but what if I just giggled a little? It’s a lot easier if you then can go to your list and be like, okay, I’m going to watch that sketch. That always makes me laugh. I’m going to watch that YouTube video. I’m going to remember that story that Eric told me. And then often, despite yourself, you will start laughing and that is when you need it the most. So my most basic one is like notice it and then document it. Keep yourself a little humor file.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:45 That’s a really useful idea because you’re right, I will forget this Santa story. In two days it’ll be gone. And these sort of things, I feel like they’re always happening, but I just don’t. I just don’t remember them. Like when you just told me, like, keep track of what makes you laugh.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:59 I’m like, well, I maybe could describe it structurally in some way, but there was one in your book, though, that I definitely want to check out. You said there’s a Reddit forum that you and your wife visit called contagious. Laughter. Yeah, that does crack me up. I mean, almost every time, just even thinking about it, I almost start to laugh because it’s hysterical.
Chris Duffy 00:27:19 Yes, this is one of the like, things that’s like, I think that just because laughter isn’t always complicated doesn’t mean that it’s not great. And so one of the ways that laughter is not complicated is that we often will laugh really hard just watching someone else and listening to someone else laugh really hard. And so there truly is just like this subreddit that is called Contagious Laughter. And it’s just videos of people laughing at something and they’re laughing so hard they can’t contain themselves. And then I watch this with my wife, and we just start laughing hysterically at these people laughing. And it’s not identifiable most of the time.
Chris Duffy 00:27:49 It’s like a joke. It’s just it’s so funny to hear people having such a good time. So again, it doesn’t have to be like complex to be really, like meaningful and worthwhile.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:56 It’s strange how that works like that sort of changes in some way what we think about as laughter in that it’s contagious. Yeah, like a yawn. I’m sure there’s some psychology or biology behind it, but it’s very different than what normally makes us laugh, you know?
Chris Duffy 00:28:15 Actually, I’m going to push back on that a little bit. I think that the science of laughter, when I talk to people who really study this, they said that we tend to think that we laugh at things that are funny or jokes. But in reality, like the vast majority of laughter in your day to day life is just kind of this social lubricant that happens as a pause in conversations or happens not in response to anything that would really identifiably be regarded as a joke or clever. Like laughter serves this purpose evolutionarily of bonding us together.
Chris Duffy 00:28:44 And one of the reasons I think, especially right now, where we are as a society again, why I wrote this book and care about it, is because it’s so frequent that we are in conversation with a person and they’re not actually all the way. They’re they’re half they’re they’re checking their email, or they’re thinking about the thing that they’re going to do next or there’s something else going on. You don’t have their full presence. But when you and another person are laughing hard together, you know you are locked into that moment with this other person. Right. When a group is laughing all together. There you are. Not half. There half. Somewhere else. You are all the way there. And evolutionarily, one of the theories of why we developed humor, why laughter is universal in human societies, is because of that social function of bonding people together, but also because we can really immediately tell when someone is fake laughing. That told us a really important piece of information about whether this person was part of our group or not, whether they actually understood what was going on.
Chris Duffy 00:29:41 Because if they didn’t, that might mean that they’re a little dangerous and we need to take some precautions around them.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:47 I recently went down a little bit of a rabbit hole and is this typical of me? I only remember about 4% of it, but it was whether animals have a sense of humor. And it turns out there seemed to be a good number of animals that do laugh, and it does seem to be a social lubricant. Obviously, what nobody can tell is like kind of panther tell a joke. I mean, like like seriously. Like, hey, are they capable of, like, making a joke? Yeah. And who knows? You know, I think all the time when we learn more about animals, we’re like, wow, there was there was stuff going on there we just had no idea about.
Chris Duffy 00:30:22 Yeah, we like to. We like to think we’re so special, you know? Like, we like to think as individuals were so special. And we like to think as a, as a species for so special.
Chris Duffy 00:30:30 And I think it’s it’s always fun when we realize like, oh, we’re not the only ones that can use sticks. Oh, okay. Well, surely we’re the only ones who have, you know, words and noises that mean certain things. Oh, we’re not the only ones that do that. Oh, well, surely we’re the only ones that make each other laugh. oh. Yeah. And depending on what you think of as a joke, right, like. Right. I think some people would say that the earliest, most basic form of a joke, the joke that works on babies, but also that chimpanzees do to each other is tickle. I’m gonna get ya. So if you think of that as a joke, then like that, that joke does play across species, right? I’m going to get you a joke.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:06 Yeah. they’re they’re intentionally trying. Well, I guess it’s hard to say what they’re doing because we’re not we’re not in their head. But it does seem very apparent they are making an attempt to generate laughter.
Chris Duffy 00:31:19 Yeah. Well, I also love the idea of, like, an octopus telling a classic setup punchline joke. You know, an octopus being like, what’s got eight arms and is looking for dinner? This guy that. That that would be incredible. I hope that happens. I hope one day we could communicate with them enough to hear that that’s what they’re doing down there.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:35 Well, they do some wild, wild things.
Chris Duffy 00:31:38 Yeah. One time I talked to an octopus expert who told me that if octopuses, I think it’s actually octopuses was one thing she taught me instead of octopi.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:45 Octopi?
Chris Duffy 00:31:46 Yeah. she told me that if they lived to the same amount of time, they had the same lifespan as humans, that they would be the dominant species on the planet because they’re so smart, but they just only live three years or five years, so that’s why they haven’t reached human society levels.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:00 I would not be surprised. Well, this is not a show about octopuses. It’s hard for me to say that I want to say it right.
Chris Duffy 00:32:06 It sounds wrong. It sounds uncomfortable, even if it’s correct. So let’s just say octopi. But also, if you are out there and you’re an octopus expert and what I just said is completely deranged, please write to me and tell me. Chris, you must never repeat that octopus fact ever again. Well, I mean, and also, if you’re an octopus using a computer, please write to me just because I want to talk to you.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:25 I don’t know how many suckers they have. They have a lot of them. They can individually control them. Like, I mean, we can’t. What’s the old walk and chew gum at the same time kind of thing? They’re controlling a thousand suckers independently. Yeah, and they can change their skin color in an instant. And that’s just the beginning of it. It gets far wilder.
Chris Duffy 00:32:44 I mean, this is so delightful to me because truly, if I had predicted, like, we’re going to talk about my book about humor, what’s a topic that we’ll probably discuss? I would have never thought the number of suckers that an octopus have would come up, and I’m delighted that it did.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:56 And let’s take that number thousand with a grain of salt.
Chris Duffy 00:32:59 I think once again, we’re going to have a full fact check out.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:03 The terms that are that are covered in these.
Chris Duffy 00:33:05 The cephalopod community is going to be up in arms over this. Yes. Eight arms.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:25 One of the things you say is the first step to laughing more is noticing more. So we’ve talked about noticing what makes you laugh, but I don’t think that’s all you mean by that statement?
Chris Duffy 00:33:36 No. And in fact, if you’re a person who feels like, hey, I walk around the world and I don’t laugh very often, like I, you know, when’s the last time I laughed? I don’t know. One thing that I would encourage you to start with is just trying to notice things in your everyday experience that you haven’t noticed before, because I think a lot of us fall into this pattern of just kind of being on autopilot. Right, right. I drive my car, or I get in the public transportation and I go to work, and it’s the same route every day, and I’m kind of just not seeing the things.
Chris Duffy 00:34:09 It’s a blur in the background, and the first step towards having something make you laugh is to notice things that are odd and unusual, or strange things that strike you as like, why is that? You have like a question about them. And I think the best way to do that is to to try and see the world around you with fresh perspective. Like, imagine that when you move to a new house, or when you go and visit a place that you’ve never been before. You notice all the little details you notice like, What’s the smell that they have in this house? How did they set up the cabinets? What is the decoration on the wall? What is the way that they have put the toilet paper on the roll? Does it go over under? These are like the kind of details that we notice the first time. And then after that, we don’t notice them again. And I think if you just try and push yourself into the noticing, consciously try and force yourself to notice.
Chris Duffy 00:34:58 Seek out a few of the small details of the weird things, and then just think about them for a second. And it’s not like they’re all going to be like immediate laugh out loud belly laughs. But that’s the seeds of humor. That’s the seeds of comedy is noticing the strange and unusual things and then starting to think about like, well, why would that be?
Eric Zimmer 00:35:16 When I think about when I’m most humorless is when I’m locked in my head thinking about something. So we’re talking about your book. I’ve got a book coming out right when I’m locked in my head thinking about book book promotion, book promotion, then I’m humorless to a large degree because I’m not noticing anything around me. I’m not really there, you know? I’m not really there. And this ability to notice, I think, is so fundamental to so many aspects of a good life. So can I be present? There’s this idea that, like, senses are kind of like the portal to the now, right? Like you want to be present.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:55 It’s through your senses. And that is exactly kind of what you’re saying.
Chris Duffy 00:35:59 Totally. Well, I also think just like having an awareness of what is actually happening and being able to think about it from like a slightly different perspective than you might your default perspective. So for me, right. Like you and I are in this moment, and on one level, I am having a conversation with Eric Zimmer and we are talking about these ideas and it’s a podcast and it all makes total sense. Okay. But then if I think about where I am and I pay really close attention to where I am from another perspective, I am sitting alone in a closet talking about wolves to no one like I am. Someone would just hear me be like, yeah, you got to be careful with wolves. And then they’re like, What is Chris doing? He is truly alone in a closet and there’s no one else in there with him. Like I’m talking to a small rectangular box and somehow that is translating across distance to you.
Chris Duffy 00:36:46 But that’s kind of hilarious to just think about it from that other perspective. So I think often I can kind of like think about, well, what would my neighbor think if they walked outside my house right now. What would they perceive this to be versus what it actually is in my perspective?
Eric Zimmer 00:37:01 You are in a closet.
Chris Duffy 00:37:03 Yes. This is my my little recording closet, which is. That’s how I record.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:07 My closets are great. I you know, I was telling you, I just moved into a new studio space and it’s going to take a lot of work to get this thing into what a simple closet would do if I had an extra closet.
Chris Duffy 00:37:17 This is the funniest part about like, the the world of podcasting is that, whenever people are always surprised that like, truly the deepest podcast hack is that if you get in like a coat closet, you’re going to have great audio. And so a lot of times if the video isn’t needed, people will truly be like in a pile of coats.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:33 Me too, that we have a closet in our house. We have like one big closet. But yeah, if I don’t need a video, it’s the perfect place to just go and set up the laptop. It is. I mean, it is the perfect sound room, like you’d work hard to get a room to sound that way.
Chris Duffy 00:37:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s also like, talking about noticing small things that make you laugh, right? It’s like you and I both have, like, an inherent understanding of the desirability of closets as a place to spend time, which I just think is, like, kind of inherently ridiculous, right? Like, most people don’t rate their closets in terms of like, well, I’d spend hours in that closet, but this closet is not nearly as comfortable.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:10 There’s a whole also host of interpretations to that’s a closet you don’t want to be in.
Chris Duffy 00:38:16 Yeah. Exactly right. Coming out.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:18 Of.
Chris Duffy 00:38:18 The closet.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:18 Of ten closet ways with that one.
Chris Duffy 00:38:20 That’s for sure.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:22 All right. So the pillars that you sort of laid out is notice the world is filled with absurdity. We’ve talked about laughing at yourself. Now I want to talk about taking social risks. And you’ve got to tell us about the LinkedIn CEO thing.
Chris Duffy 00:38:34 Sure. Okay. So the yeah, the story that that Eric is referencing here is I am a comedian professionally. Before that I was a elementary school teacher and so I never really had any use for business networking. Right. Like I never had an actual LinkedIn profile, but I knew that it was something that friends and family had had used. And I was kind of curious about it, because it just seemed like this whole world that I had never ventured into. So one day I was playing around and just decided to create a LinkedIn profile for myself. But as I was doing it, I was amazed that when you select where you work that you can just choose any company that they don’t like, verify that. I would have thought, like the boss, that your company has to say yes, Chris works at Nike or something.
Chris Duffy 00:39:16 So to test out how far you could go with that, I was like, well, I wonder if it’ll let me do this. And I made my job on LinkedIn, CEO of LinkedIn. And I clicked save on my profile. And I was just wondering, like, would it let me to do that? But not only did it allow me to do that, but it sent an email to everyone in my contact list that said, congratulate Chris on his new position. He’s now CEO of LinkedIn, and that email came from LinkedIn. So that is obviously the greatest joke that I’ve ever been a part of.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:44 I assume there was mass confusion among your friends.
Chris Duffy 00:39:48 Well, the thing is, anyone who knows me knows that there is no chance that I had ascended to the pinnacle of corporate governance. They were like, this is clearly the buffoon has entered the system here. Yeah. So people just wrote back like, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how you did this.
Chris Duffy 00:40:03 And I also was like, I don’t know how this happened. And incredibly, LinkedIn did not, like, recognize that this had happened for more than a year. And at a year, everyone got another email that said congratulate Chris and his work anniversary as one year of CEO at LinkedIn. And then at that point, it started kind of going viral, and I got a message from a woman named Faith who works at LinkedIn’s trust and security team, and she said, hey, your account has been locked due to concerns about its accuracy. And so I sent Faith a photo of my license front and back and said, don’t worry, it’s accurate. My name is Chris Duffy, and she said, yeah, the problem is not that we don’t think your name is Chris Duffy. The problem is you’re saying that you’re the CEO of LinkedIn. And I said, Faith, you’re taking a pretty disrespectful tone for someone who works for me. And then five seconds later, my account was permanently deleted and to this day it remains deleted.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:55 You cannot get on LinkedIn.
Chris Duffy 00:40:56 No, I had to make like a burner account to get back on LinkedIn in a different way.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:00 That’s so good. That is so good.
Chris Duffy 00:41:02 But you know that that story is like obviously, I think it’s my proudest comedic achievement and probably will be till the day I die. But it also is, for me, an example of how humor is at its best when you are playfully taking risks playfully, like examining where the boundaries are, but also when you’re doing things that are public, right? It’s like it’s fun to do stuff all on your own. But humor is so inherently social that to get out there and to let other people be a part of it, to let other people laugh with you. I think that’s a really key piece, and I don’t want people to miss that. So that’s why the third pillar that I talk about, right, is you got to pay attention. Pillar one, you have to laugh at yourself. Pillar two and then you have to take social risks.
Chris Duffy 00:41:43 Get out there and make it with other people is pillar three because that’s such a key piece of what makes laughter and humor magical, is that it connects us to other people.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:53 You write in that chapter about something I heard this story years ago. I remember being sort of struck by it. And now you brought it up again, which is this idea of like, rejection therapy.
Chris Duffy 00:42:04 Oh, yeah. There’s a really incredible guy, Jaejoong, who I interviewed, and he started this thing, rejection therapy, which is basically he felt like I am being held back in my life because I’m so afraid of what would happen if someone said no, if I got rejected, I’m being held back professionally. I’m being held back personally because I just live in fear. So I don’t even try. And he’s like, I’m going to do 100 days where every day for 100 days I just try and get a no. I’m deliberately going for it just to build my tolerance. And he started with things that were really small, right? Like he knew he would get to know.
Chris Duffy 00:42:35 He walks up to a stranger and says, can I have $100? And the person said, no. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as what he thought it would be. And in fact, when he discovered this really quickly, people, instead of just saying no, they would say like, well, why? They would question him about like why he needed it. They would try and find ways to help him. And, eventually he came up with all these. He had to get increasingly complex to get people to keep saying no. And so one of them was like, he went to Krispy Kreme during the Olympics and said, like, can you make an interlocking series of doughnuts that look like the Olympic rings? And incredibly, the manager was like, we’ve never done this before, but I am going to make the Olympic rings out of doughnuts and created this, like, doughnut creation for him. I just think that’s so funny and hilarious. And jaws is a is a really funny and talented person talking about it, but I also think it hits at this really fundamental truth, which is that we we so often underestimate how much people will enjoy interacting with us and helping us, and we overestimate how bad things will go if we put ourselves out there and we try something.
Chris Duffy 00:43:36 I think that the idea to me, like the magic of being a comedian and this is the magic that I actually think people who are not professional comedians could also access is that by saying, it’s okay, I want people to laugh at me. I don’t care if people view me as a buffoon. In fact, I invite you to view me as a buffoon. That would be great. It lets me do all these things that make my life better. It lets me ask questions when I don’t understand. It lets me go to the strange place where maybe I don’t totally fit in just because I’m curious. And you know, I’m really I want to encourage more people to say, like, you don’t need to have the job title comedian to be willing to have people laugh at you and to see that it actually feels good. Not bad. Not to say that there can’t be mean laughing at you, but most of it is not that. Most of it is just like, ha, that’s so strange and odd and strange and odd are actually things that add spice and variety to our life.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:25 Yeah, I think we, underestimate how well things will go in a situation like that. We underestimate how people might respond positively, totally. And we overestimate the awkwardness. And I think we also underestimate the value it has for us. Right. That what interaction feels like. I was having a medical procedure just a couple of days ago, and so I was in the facility and I interacted with, you know, by the time they finally took me back, like four different nurses and for whatever reason, I just was it was a colonoscopy. So I had not eaten for 36 hours and was just kind of loopy. And so I was just kind of having fun and, and I just I realized, like, we’re all having a good time just because I’m, I’m just a little bit more outgoing, a little bit more willing to say something odd than I normally would be.
Chris Duffy 00:45:19 Yeah, actually, I think a colonoscopy is like the perfect metaphor for what I’m talking about here, because.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:24 We’re gonna try it.
Chris Duffy 00:45:25 Yeah. Here’s the thing. Is it colonoscopy is exactly what I’m talking about, which is the thing you think is the bad part. The colonoscopy, the procedure itself is not the bad part. It’s totally fine. You are unconscious. It’s not a problem. The part that is the bad part is the preparation. You drink the bottle and then you sit on the toilet and you have the most intense experience of your life. You are a rocket ship blasting off into space, and you do not want to be on that rocket ship. That is the part that is bad. And this is true in so many parts of our life, right? Like the thing we think is going to be bad, that like going to the party and talking to a stranger, we don’t know. That’s not bad. The bad part is preparing mentally for it, where we’re not at the party yet and we’re drinking the terrible juice, and then we’re sitting on the toilet going like, oh no, tomorrow’s going to be so bad.
Chris Duffy 00:46:09 And actually the bad part is the part before when you’re worried about it, when you actually do it, it’s great. I mean, not that a colonoscopy is like an incredible, great experience when you’re actually in it, but it’s just it’s not the bad part.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:19 You’re right. And I went to a thing last night, just like some sort of I hate this word networking event because that that’s not what it felt like. It was just sort of like a group of interesting people getting together. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. And I always approach those with a certain degree of trepidation. I am somewhat shy in new settings. I had more uncomfortableness leading up to that event than I did at the event. Although I will say there have been events I have gone to where the event itself really was.
Chris Duffy 00:46:50 Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:52 In a.
Chris Duffy 00:46:52 Way.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:53 The worst part. You know, I’m kind of like looking around on the edges, like, can I go pretend I’m on the phone? Like, how can I, how can I be here? But, God like, distract me somehow?
Chris Duffy 00:47:04 Yeah, there’s certainly a straggler all the way over there.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:07 I’m going to go talk to him, which ends up almost always being a bad idea because there’s a reason they’re way over there by themselves.
Chris Duffy 00:47:14 But okay, so one 100%. You’re right. Sometimes the event is actually the bad part, but I think it’s rarer than we would think. And the second part though is when you’re in these social situations to give another practical thing that if you’re listening, you can actually do. Here’s what I mean by taking social risk and bringing humor in, okay, not taking a social risk. You talk to someone new at an event. The not risk version is. Hey, so what do you do? Where do you live? How long have you lived there? Do you like it? Pretty boring conversation. Safe. Not risky, but, like, not memorable for you. Not fun. You’re probably not going to laugh. Yeah, the social, riskier version is to come in and to offer something to say to them. Like I just had the best soup of my entire life.
Chris Duffy 00:47:57 Let them respond to that. Or to say, what’s the best soup you’ve ever had? I’m really feeling in a mood for soup. You know, like, that’s kind of an odd question. It’s not a dangerous, weird, offensive question, but it’s just you’re taking a small social risk by coming to them with something that is true and genuine to you. And that is like, not the typical script. And when you get off that script, you have the possibility of having like a really interesting conversation with someone. I mean, you want to take a really like literal steal from Eric Zimmer, for example. You could go up to someone and say, I just heard this story about the wolves. What does that mean to you? That may not. That may lead to a profound conversation. It may not need to like laughter, but it’s a risk that is going to take you in a direction that is more interesting.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:35 You reference I. I had him on the show, so I should be able to pronounce his name, but I cannot.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:41 Adam Mastroianni.
Chris Duffy 00:48:42 Oh, yeah. Mastroianni. Adam. Okay, I got it.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:45 and he talks about, doorknobs. And I think this is similar to what you’re describing right here. Right.
Chris Duffy 00:48:51 Totally. This is this is exactly what he’s talking about when he talks about this idea of he calls them conversational doorknobs, or like, I think the academic term is like affordances, which means that like a way that you allow people to enter. Right. So the way that Adam would say it is like if you give someone a conversation to a doorknob, it’s a topic that they can hold on to that doorknob, turn it, and enter into a new room, into an interesting space. And he did academic research on why conversations end and whether they end when people want them to or not. And the thing that he found is that what keeps the conversation going in a way that is satisfying to both people is when you let each other build, you let each other go, and interesting new directions. And so what that means is not just giving doorknobs to say the interesting thing.
Chris Duffy 00:49:32 That’s not just how long have you been at this party? But is that when someone offers you something to then take it to, to go with it? So if you say to me, I had a medical procedure last week to not just let that glide by. If you seem like you want to talk about it and say like, what was the medical procedure, how are you feeling? You know, and then we talk about that more. Oh, you know, I heard that colonoscopy prep is the bad part. What what flavor did you choose? Those are the ways that, like, you can keep a conversation going by offering and accepting doorknobs. That’s something that he talks about. And he brings it up specifically in the context of he’s both a really talented academic and a really talented improviser. Very funny, funny, funny person who performs on stage. And this is how you keep a comedic scene going, is by offering and accepting bricks of comedy that then build together.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:20 So I wanted to talk about a pretty personal part of the book, where you describe your wife and challenges that she had, and how you guys used humor to help.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:34 Yeah, it’s in a chapter about humor as medicine and you in a way that I love. Don’t oversell it. So talk to me about both humor as a medicine and then maybe some about this particular aspect of your life.
Chris Duffy 00:50:46 Yeah. Thank you for asking that and asking it in such a respectful way. So first, laughter as medicine. You know, people often say that laughter is the best medicine. And my joke, which is also not a joke, is that like laughter is transparently not the best medicine. Like, right? Penicillin is certainly better medicine than laughter. I think that if you were going in for surgery and the doctor was like, we decided we’re not going to give you anesthetic. Instead, I got a great knock knock joke. You’d be like, that’s not acceptable, right? Like, laughter is not as good a medicine as in in analgesic. So I just first of all, don’t think that that is true. But what I do think that laughter is really powerful in.
Chris Duffy 00:51:22 And when I talk to emergency room doctors, when I interviewed, a psychologist who used to run the anxiety lab at UCSF when I talked to nursing professors who helped train people who work in nursing homes, a thing that kind of they all talked about was how humor doesn’t, can’t, can’t necessarily solve a medical problem. But changing your perspective on it, changing your experience of what is happening to you is a significant medical outcome. So if you are really worried, if you are in pain and then you laugh and it relieves the fear somewhat, it relieves the pain somewhat. It distracts you from how you’re feeling. That’s a significant clinical outcome. And I think that’s where humor can really play an important role. So for example, the doctor, Jeremy Foust, who’s an emergency room doctor in Boston, he told me that one way that he uses humor is often if he’s going to give someone stitches or they need to have some sort of procedure, an open wound, he has to inject them with something that’s going to numb them.
Chris Duffy 00:52:22 But it really hurts before they go numb. It’s going to hurt, and that’s kind of unavoidable. So one thing that he will sometimes say is if they’re like a salty old Boston guy. He’ll go like, what I’m about to do to you is going to hurt more than what the Yankees did to the Red Sox last night. And they’ll, like, laugh and think that that’s like a funny thing for the doctor to say. And then when he gives them the injection, it hurts less because they are laughing. It’s been framed for them in a humorous way, and I experienced that in my own life during this period of time, where certainly the worst time in my life, like my wife had had gotten these injuries and we couldn’t quite figure out what was happening. And she was in a lot of pain, and she basically had gone from being like, able bodied to being unable to, to walk for even a moderate amount of time and was in pain all the time. And that had led to then, you know, mental anguish about what her future was going to be like, but also just wanting to be out of pain all the time.
Chris Duffy 00:53:15 So she’s in a really dark place, and I was taking care of her and nothing was working, and it just was the worst period of time in my life for hers. Still to this day, again, like laughing was not a thing that was happening a lot. And it wasn’t like, you know, I was like, hey, you’re in the worst pain. And I’m really confused. And everything’s getting worse every day. Time to giggle. Like it just wasn’t happening, right? But then it was really, like, led by her. She was like, we just need to, like, have some, like, I just have to have some sort of release. And so we found like a video that made her laugh. And then we tried to just experiment with like, okay, let’s try every day to have something where we laugh together. It can be 45 seconds after, you know, 23 hours of pain and suffering. Let’s have 45 seconds where we try to find a way to laugh together.
Chris Duffy 00:54:04 And it did not solve any of the underlying problems. Right. But it dramatically reframed my experience of the day and her experience of the day and our relationship to each other in a way that made the other 23 hours manageable. That made them really just a little bit of that pressure and tension and helped us to have this moment of connection where like, it wasn’t all bad. It was a it was a flag in the time. That was a memorable moment of positivity. And and that for me is like one of the most incredible parts of humor is that you can actually have a brief release, a brief break from things being so bad. If you can find a way to actually connect and to laugh.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:44 Yeah, there’s a couple of things about that that I love. Obviously, it’s a very difficult story and I think she’s doing better now.
Chris Duffy 00:54:50 Yeah, she’s doing much better now. yeah. So it it feels like it’s in the past and. Yeah. but you know, that that’s inevitably as humans, like we’re going to have periods of all of pain and suffering again.
Chris Duffy 00:55:02 So yeah. Yeah. Yes. But right now we’re in a good period for sure.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:06 The two things I really like about that is one is you did treat it like a medicine, meaning there’s a time that I go take this thing, right? Like, you know, medicine isn’t any good when it sits on the shelf. Right. It’s only good if you take it. And so you are very consciously like, we’re going to give ourselves this medicine. The other thing that my experience is, and maybe that’s wrong, but I don’t know.
Chris Duffy 00:55:29 I never thought about it that way. I think that’s totally accurate. It’s just interesting. I’ve never heard it. Yeah, I’ve never heard it put that way. That’s fascinating. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:35 It’s true. The second piece, and this is my experience, is that if I sometimes intentionally seek out humor, it reminds me that lots of other things are funny. It has a spreading effect in my life. Like I do it for that one minute, five minute, ten minute.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:54 Yeah. But it then other minutes of the day, I remember. Oh, yeah, you can make a joke, you can laugh, you can have fun.
Chris Duffy 00:56:01 Yeah. Well, you know, I have been in therapy and talk therapy and found it really helpful for several years. And if I could probably save at least one listener thousands of dollars by telling you that almost all of my therapy has boiled down to. That’s not the only way to see it, you know, like, that’s true what you’re seeing at. But there’s other ways of. There’s other ways that are equally valid for this exact same experience to be perceived. And humor does that right. Humor lets us be like, that’s so true. I never thought of it that way. Laughing, having a good time, but also realizing, like I’m locked into one way of seeing this. And that’s not the only way of seeing this.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:39 Right. And that’s kind of back to where we were earlier when we talked about the the mindset or the lens of of humor.
Chris Duffy 00:56:46 Totally.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:47 One of the things I love to say to people I’m working with is just the question like, ask yourself, like, what am I making this mean? And what else could it mean? It’s not that you have to discard what you think it means, because often you can’t. Yeah, but just open up some space to like. But it could also perhaps mean that. And it could also perhaps mean that, that just let some air into the room.
Chris Duffy 00:57:10 Yeah. I mean, I, I often get locked into these ideas of like, if I don’t do well in this interview, then my career is over. If I don’t crush, like if Eric doesn’t laugh every 10s, then no one will ever hire me again and my book won’t sell and I will be a disaster. And it’s just like, that’s actually quite a lot to put on this one conversation. You know, like you don’t.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:35 Need to inform you that.
Chris Duffy 00:57:36 No, no.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:37 That that the one you feed is kind of across the board, a career destroyer for everybody.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:43 You show up on the one you feed and you are no longer taken seriously anywhere.
Chris Duffy 00:57:48 The one you feed is actually you being fed to the machine. That’s right.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:51 That’s exactly.
Chris Duffy 00:57:52 It. Yeah. The one you feed and you’re feeding the one right now. Chris, all of your future is going into its belly. Yeah, well, that is unfortunate to learn. I do wish I had known that before I was here, but I still.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:03 I don’t get many guests when we share that, though.
Chris Duffy 00:58:05 I respect you for telling me midway through. And I think that that actually is like quite honest and forthright of you. So thank you. But, you know, it’s just like it’s it’s so easy to, to convince ourselves that the one way that we’re seeing something is the only way and is the only possible path That is true, and the reasons I love laughing at myself. And I love having friends who are able to make me laugh at myself because they can point out the ways in which, like, I think that I am normal and reasonable and in fact am ridiculous and illogical.
Chris Duffy 00:58:33 And they can do that with love and with humor. And I can go like, you know, you are actually right. That is a that is an unhinged way to view this.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:41 Yeah. Chris and I, the other Chris, you know, joke a lot. Last night he was making a joke. We were talking about something about the book, and he said, like. And, you know, you’re a best selling author. And I said, well, okay, like, I’m an author, like, let’s leave the best selling. And then he turned around and said something like, what I meant is it’s going to be the book that is sold back to the second hand store the fastest, right? Like, you know, the best selling, as in, you know, we’ve joked about, you know, the number one book to prop up your table. I mean, you know, just constant jokes about, like, you know, all the ways that this could be like, the worst book ever.
Chris Duffy 00:59:17 I do love the idea that you’re like, no matter what, I will be a record setting author. It’s just, which record will I set?
Eric Zimmer 00:59:24 Exactly.
Chris Duffy 00:59:25 I actually, I have a footnote in the book where I talk about how the stand up comedian Joe Mandy named his special on Netflix, Jo Mandy’s award winning comedy special. And as far as I know, it actually didn’t win any awards. But it still is his award winning comedy special. And I think that is like a perfect, brilliant joke.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:42 Well, I mean, you see it happen everywhere, like restaurants do this all the time. Like the number one Chinese restaurant. I mean, like, that’s the actual name.
Chris Duffy 00:59:50 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:50 It’s like, you know, you just just claim it, you know? Just claim it.
Chris Duffy 00:59:54 Well, that’s like that, that perfect moment in elf where, you know, Will Ferrell as Elf runs in and goes, like, world’s best coffee. Congratulations. You did it. Wow.
Eric Zimmer 01:00:04 That is a great movie.
Eric Zimmer 01:00:06 Yeah, we’re at the end of our time, but I thought we could wrap up by having you share a little bit about how you start the book with the funniest person you’ve ever met. Being a child, you end the book with someone named Maureen Mighty Mo Kornfield. And I was wondering if you could tell us about her. And then I just loved to end with her advice that ends your book.
Chris Duffy 01:00:28 Sure. Yeah. So the funniest person I ever met is a ten year old student who I taught, who had a column in the school newspaper where he was a food critic who reviewed cafeteria food. Gary, the food critic, is the funniest person I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. And the second funniest person I’ve ever met is a 104 year old world champion swimmer named Mighty Mo. I live in Los Angeles, and right when I had moved here, I started to go to the public pools to swim. I was like, okay, I’m in a place where it’s warm and sunny and like, let me take advantage of that.
Chris Duffy 01:00:57 And I met Mo at these pools. She was swimming and swimming laps, and she was already 99 when I met her. And she quickly became one of my favorite people in the world because she has such a quick, witty sense of humor, but also is just like she would swim up to me like once I’m a guy, got in the pool and he had a really thick beard, but he was bald on the top of his head and she swam over to me and said, looks like they hey, I got a deal on real estate on the chin. And I was just like, that’s hilarious. Like, I did not expect this elderly woman swimming to come over and and pull out an incredible one liner like that. And she was just always saying funny things like that. And as I got to know her better and, you know, now has become like a kind of a chosen family member for me. I’ve just seen how her perspective and her ability to laugh, it draws people to her and it makes her the center of community, even as she’s, you know, gotten to to quite an advanced age.
Chris Duffy 01:01:52 So, yeah. So I gave her the final words in my book, which, which I can read to you. Yeah. You’ve heard more than enough from me to wrap things up. Here’s Maureen Mighty Moe Kornfeld. It’s pretty easy to focus on things that aren’t going well, feeling sorry for yourself, which we all do and I do. Too much humor takes you out of yourself and gives you a different, better perspective. Mo’s advice on how to improve your life. Laugh. You can’t get in too much trouble unless you laugh at the wrong time or the wrong person. Then you might get thrown into a ditch or something. So there you have it. Have a sense of humor. Don’t forget to laugh. And when you end up face down in a ditch, at least you’ll know how you got there.
Eric Zimmer 01:02:29 Thank you. Chris, this has been a real fun interview.
Chris Duffy 01:02:32 Oh, thank you so much, Eric. It’s been an absolute treat. I’m so honored to have been here.
Eric Zimmer 01:02:36 Thank you so much for listening to the show.
Eric Zimmer 01:02:38 If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
