How to make humour your learning superpower
Laughing cat photo by Amir Ghoorchiani
A horse walks into a bar. A chicken crosses the road. A sheep…
Actually, let’s leave the sheep alone.
'When humour goes, there goes civilization,' said American humourist and author, Erma Bombeck. She’s not wrong: humour keeps the wheels on when tedium and frustration threaten to pull us apart. It keeps us honest, makes us vunerable, allows us to laugh at ourselves and get through difficult situations. It helps us break the ice and make friends fast. Laughter brings us together, lowers blood pressure, reduces stress and makes us feel good. You could say humour is the greatest human superpower.
And as superpowers go – humour isn’t a one-trick pony. A meta-analysis of educational humour research identified non-aggressive, relevant, appropriate humour as a helpful learning tool, particularly if it was sandwiched between instruction and repetition. One study showed that using humour was as effective as repetition for retaining information.
Why does it work? Neuroscience research shows that humour activates the brain’s dopamine reward system, helping to stimulate pathways to new knowledge, and has a positive effect on memory and information retention. Additionally, understanding and processing humour is cognitively more challenging so your brain is immediately more engaged with the content. We naturally respond to stories and jokes better than dry content – humour can help us not only remember concepts but also to understand them more easily.
So why is humour so under-used when it comes to learning content? Maybe because it seems risky, scary or too subjective; but you don’t need to go full Ricky Gervais to get the benefits of humour in your learning content.
Here’s how:
Do use humour that is:
relevant to the material
positive
non-aggressive.
Don’t use humour that is:
irrelevant
negative
aggressive
derisive or hostile
culturally inappropriate.
If you want to see this in action – we’ve taken online coaching training and packaged it in to bite-sized videos delivered by some of Australia’s best comedians – Shane Jacobson is one. Have a look at The GIST by GRIST and start thinking about how you can incorporate humour into your next piece of learning.
And about that sheep – he crossed a kangaroo and became a woolly jumper 😉
