Featuring David Granirer, Counsellor Video Title: How Does Social Humor Help You Deal With Life? Duration: 1 minute, 42 seconds

Ninety percent of laughter in social context is not in response to something funny. It’s a way of conveying support for someone, empathy, agreement, familiarity.

So in order to stimulate laughter, you don’t actually have to be funny. You don’t actually have to tell jokes. You just have to connect with someone and the laughter will happen.

If you’re a stand-up comic it’s a whole different thing. But most people don’t want to be stand-up comics, they just want to be able to use humour in social interactions and laugh together with people, and that happens relatively easily as part of an everyday conversation.

When people are speaking together and there’s a good, positive connection, people want to convey a sense of support, a sense of empathy, with the other person. And a lot of times the way we do that is by laughing through laughter.

If you watch people, just in your general everyday life, you’ll notice people laughing all the time with other people when they’re having a good conversation. And when you think of what they actually said, it probably isn’t funny at all. But in that moment, that person was conveying a sense of sympathy, empathy, support, with the person that was speaking, and they were using laughter in order to do that.

If people want to know more about that process, good idea to talk to their counsellor, psychiatrist, therapist, whoever, to shed some insight on how this all works.

Presenter: Mr. David Granirer, Counselor, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Counselor