For 37 years I lived in Peoria, Illinois, the world headquarters of the Caterpillar Tractor Company. Caterpillar is the world leader in earth moving equipment. They make bulldozers of all sizes, including backhoes for digging holes and ditches and many more pieces of big equipment designed to reshape the world. The specific piece of equipment I want to refer to here is the motor grader. This is the machine whose tires can tilt one way or the other and which has a blade to smooth a roadbed for a proposed highway or perhaps a building site.
“Well,” you may ask, “what does all this have to do with speaking?” My answer to you is this. To me, humor is the motor grader that smoothes out the bumps and ruts of life and makes it livable. God made us the only animal with the ability to laugh. He must have figured that if we couldn’t laugh at some of our foibles, failures, and frustrations, we’d all end up in the loony bin!
Humor is a very delicate and serious thing. It can be, as my speaker colleague Dr. Charlie Jarvis so succinctly has defined it, “a painful thing told playfully.” Witness the jokes or humorous stories we have heard told about death or illness. For example, this Henny Youngman line: “A doctor gave a man six months to live. He didn’t pay his bill, so the doctor gave him another six months!”
I use the following story when talking about being able to laugh at yourself when things don’t go as you planned. “Just to be nice, I sent flowers to a friend of mine who opened up a new branch of his business. I went out to congratulate him and, naturally I looked for my flowers. What I found was a wreath with a bow on it that said, ‘Rest in Peace.’ I left in a huff, called the florist and said, ‘I sent a guy flowers to wish him well in his new business and you sent him a wreath with a bow on it that says ‘Rest in Peace!’ The florist said, “I’m not worried about you, Art. But someplace in this town, there’s a guy being buried, and he’s got a big bouquet of roses with a sash that says, ‘Good luck in your new location!’
This story allows me to make a serious point. Sometimes our best intentions go down the drain. So, the selection of humor is not just a matter of whether or not it is funny; it is also a matter of whether it is relevant to the message.
In another example of humor, I may be talking about why knowledge is so important for the sales or management person. I will use a comparison between NFL football and life.
When a football player comes to pre-season camp, he is expected to be in good physical condition. Before anything else happens, he receives a rigid physical examination. The number one priority in football, as it should be in any line of work, is to be physically capable to perform. After the physical exam, the player gets a playbook. That’s the beginning of the knowledge factor. Complete knowledge of the plays and what the player is expected to do on each play is pre-supposed; the same as physical conditioning is pre-supposed.
I follow this information by saying something like this, “Knowledge isn’t everything, but it is tremendously important.” Then I tell how I was working a pre-season game in Memphis when a player cussed me. I whirled and yelled, “What did you call me?” He said, “Guess. You’ve guessed at everything else today!”
After that anecdote, I say to my audience: “You cannot guess; you’ve got to know. The key issue is how do we use what we know to solve somebody else’s or our own problems?” That little vignette is used to point out the relationship between knowledge and problem solving.
