How Humor Helps

Describes how humor can enhance your relationships, your health, and your personal happiness. People like to be around others who make them laugh. A keen sense of humor can help us in a variety of areas of life, but knowing how and when to use it can be a challenge. Here, Lou Franzini shows readers how to use humor in their social worlds to make new friends, to interact well with old friends and families, and to cope with stressors in their environments. Successful humor-making contributes to increases in self-confidence and happiness in personal relationships as well as likely success in the workplace. It can help in job interviews, obtaining promotions, fun interactions with colleagues along with the old-fashioned enjoyment of doing the work itself. Humor can also backfire if it's used inappropriately, targets vulnerable groups, or employs language that may be socially offensive. Learning to read your audience, to note and adhere to established boundaries, and to create genuine humor are qualities and skills you can cultivate and hone. Using real life examples and even final messages from beyond the grave, Franzini shows you here how to use humor to its best effects.