Goofy Props Essential for Diversionary Humour

Laughter Always Trumps Stressful Situations at Work

Your six-year-old chooses this morning to decide he isn’t going to school. The 45 minutes it takes to cajole and threaten him with time-outs and loss of TV privileges means you miss that project meeting you spent months setting up.

Finally, you get to work prepared to crank out some apologetic e-mails and your computer crashes, taking your last three weeks of work with it. Trembling with righteous indignation, you prepare to reach for the phone and scream at the tech-support people.

Just then, a co-worker wearing Groucho Marx glasses and a clown wig pokes her head into your cubicle, tosses a rubber chicken into your lap and hands you a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. In spite of yourself, you feel a smile coming on, toss the rubber chicken back and have a laugh as you munch the chocolates. Five minutes later, the world is once again a beautiful place.

The above intervention is an example of diversionary humour, one of the most effective ways of defusing stress. Diversionary humour involves doing things that create humorous distractions during times of high stress, thus giving people a break from the situation and a chance to cool down.

The logic here is that when we’re under stress, physiological arousal occurs in the body, making it hard for us to think clearly or rationally. We also tend to regress into unproductive behaviors like sulking, blaming or running up a huge Visa bill.

Having a laugh interrupts this physiological cycle of arousal, restoring our sense of perspective and ability to think clearly. And science has proven that when we’re happy, the body recovers more quickly from the biological arousal of upsetting emotions.

Because of their ability to provide a quick laugh, props play an important role in diversionary humour. When I worked at the Vancouver Crisis Centre, we had baskets containing psychedelic plastic slinkies, koosh balls, play dough and other toys in our phone room for the volunteers to use after a tough call. Diversionary humour involving props was promoted as part of our organizational culture because we realized it was one of the quickest, most-effective ways we had to reduce stress.

I realize all this sounds great, but you may be wondering, how do you actually get people to use humour in these situations? The answer lies in establishing precedents.