Denise Evangelides would love to be a stand-up comic. As a single mother of two boys, the role isn't in her immediate future. But that hasn't stopped her from making laughter part of her job. Evangelides is an oncology nurse at St. Joseph's Hospital in Chicago. You may not think her job would offer much opportunity for humor. Attending to cancer patients is obviously serious business. But Evangelides knows that beyond good fun, laughter is also good medicine.
To encourage healing through fun activities, she established one of the first "humor carts" in a Chicago hospital. But that doesn't mean you'll find her romping wildly through the ward with a bag of magic tricks and a passel of jokes stashed in her hip pocket. When it comes to humor, timing is everything. Evangelides may love laughter, but she never uses it as a re-placement for compassion and caring. Rather, it is a way of showing love.
It would be easy to view this 42-year-old woman as a child who never grew up and, indeed, there is youthfulness to her personality. But she had to teach herself and the people around her how to have more fun in the midst of illness and crisis.
Evangelides traces her vocational love affair with laughter back to 1988 when she shared a raunchy joke with some of her fellow nurses. She'd never been a joke-teller before that. But the response she received was so satisfying that she started telling more and more jokes, until the medical staff came to expect and demand them from her.
Her repertoire was quickly depleted. To shore up her joke file, Evangelides founded the Joke Exchange, a biannual event where people from all around the city come to swap jokes.
Now, Evangelides systematically works to bring more fun and humor to her job. After attending a seminar with the Carolina Ha-Ha Association, she became a "certified humor presenter." She's also completing her master's thesis in public health on the "Applications of Humor in a Hospital Setting." Meanwhile, you can send your best jokes to her in care of St. Joseph's Hospital in Chicago.
If you're like most adults, the wear-and-tear of everyday life has probably taken away some of your gift for laughter. As a child, you were likely to have laughed more than 100 times a day. Sadly, research shows that by age 44, most people are down to less than a dozen mild chuckles daily, if that. Life as a grownup can be pretty much of a downer.
Denise would like to turn that around.
"Humor is like verbal aikido," she says "and you can find it in everyday life."
While some professionals may look askance at her light-hearted approach, there's plenty of good research to support her beliefs.
You may be familiar with the story of the late Norman Cousins. While an editor of the Saturday Review in 1964,
Cousins was treated for a crippling collagen illness that was excruciatingly painful and supposedly irreversible. Refusing to give up, Cousins had a movie projector set up in his hospital room so he could watch Three Stooges movies and Alan Funt's memorable television series, Candid Camera.
Cousins discovered that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughing created an anesthetic effect that allowed at least two hours of pain-free sleep. Eventually, he managed to laugh his way out of the hospital and a very serious illness.
Besides any physiological advantage, laughter can also help you to maintain (or regain) your perspective, increase your emotional resiliency and cope better with stress. But you may have to provide context occasionally to make sure others don't get the wrong idea.
For example, the human resources director of a psychiatric hospital in the Midwest was upset that patients were not adhering to hospital regulations. When she complained bitterly to the medical director about it, she was astonished to hear him laugh at her concerns. Seeing her chagrin, he hastened to explain: "We're treating psychiatric patients here. If they didn't have problems, you and I would be out of work."
By mixing humor and common sense, the medical director was able to gently remind the HR director that she shouldn't expect patients to be trouble-free or to behave in a totally rational manner.
Knowing your audience-as the medical director did-is the first step toward successful service delivery and your own mental health.
Take the Plunge
If you're on the lookout for new adventures in living, there are role models trailblazing new paths all around you. Perhaps you remember the Reebok commercial where two real-life brothers put their sneakers to the bungee-jumping test (only to discover that the Reebok-less brother failed the jump)? Those two infamous bungee-jumping brothers once were average Americans with traditional corporate jobs.
Peter Kockleman was an engineer (whose boyhood hero was Evel Knievel). His younger sibling, John, was a computer consultant. In 1987, they saw their first bungee jump on That's Incredible. They decided to try it themselves by jumping off a 140-foot bridge at Don Pedro Reservoir near Yosemite. The thrill got them hooked. Soon, John quit his job and convinced Peter to do likewise.
"Come on, screw security," John said. "Screw stability and upward mobility. That's not what you're on earth for-to sit there and be calm, to sit there and die slowly."
The Kocklemans went on to become the kings of bungee jumping by founding Bungee Adventures, a California firm that arranges others' leaps of faith. Talk about jump-starting your life all over again.
Improve Your Social Life
Most fun work has a number of "wow" factors. Besides the intrinsic interest and excitement, it can also create more dynamic personal relationships.
Denise Evangelides's friends look forward to telling her new jokes. The future horse-farmer makes new acquaintances at the stable and takes old buddies riding with her. Karen Messina-Hirsch entertains friends with her culinary skills and they join her in the kitchen for impromptu lessons. One Thanksgiving Day, she suddenly hauled her carving knives out of the car and, on request, carved the hostess's veal breast to the oohs and ahs of an admiring audience.
Heisler's new friends are media personalities. But her long-standing pals love to turn on the radio or TV set and find her friendly face smiling out at them.
Contrast those experiences with that of the vice president of a small cosmetics manufacturing firm in Chicago who finds his work tedious. He's so glad to shut the door on it each night that he never wants to discuss it after hours. This part of his life is increasingly closed off from other people. At parties and family gatherings, he assiduously avoids the topic of his business. When someone brings it up, he changes the subject. In the process, he makes himself more unhappy. He constantly hungers for more creativity, intellectual stimulation and people contact.
He feels trapped and unhappy. Since he works in a family business, he doesn't feel he has the luxury of changing jobs or careers. So he tries to build more stimulation into his daily life with extracurricular activities. As a jazz composer, he's partly successful. But that doesn't entirely compensate for the 9-to-5 doldrums.
To overcome them, he drew one of his zanier relatives into the family business to help with some sales and marketing responsibilities. By sharing the duties with a livelier, more outgoing person, the vice president found a way to enliven his own day and feel less lonely at his job. While it's an imperfect solution (he still doesn't like his work activities), it has alleviated a piece of the problem.
When your job has humdrum responsibilities and you feel you can't leave, you can still lighten the load by working more joyously with the people who share that burden. For example, when Lou Ella Jackson first worked as a bookkeeper for a financial institution, her entire department worked together to alleviate the boredom. In addition to holding weekly breakfasts, they'd create contests to see who could "balance the most often" or "make the least errors." The sociable competition stimulated more productive and efficient work. It also enabled them to feel more involved and connected to each other.
Even if your organization frowns on employees having fun with customers, you can still try to have fun with your co-workers.
You may not think that being a documentation specialist would be a real hoot. Yet one such expert enjoyed herself immensely while working with a marketing team to introduce a new product worldwide. She admits that her package-labeling responsibilities weren't particularly sexy, but the opportunity to work with so many diverse and dynamic professionals was "a real kick." To this day, she remembers that project as great fun. And while she's since moved onward and upward, she misses working with people who really knew how to have a good time together.
What she doesn't realize is that she can exert more influence on her surroundings. She can initiate more fun-filled projects and activities herself, instead of waiting to react to others.
