Sunday, April 27, 1997

Humor Consultants Teach Workers To Laugh Again

By MAGGIE JACKSON

Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) - His shock of white hair flying, Paul McGhee slams a tennis ball to the meeting room floor. It bounces limply. "Some days are tough," he says.

He hurls another ball down. It dies with a dull thud. "And some days, it doesn't matter what you do," says McGhee. "That's when a sense of humor will help you survive."

His audience, a crowd of intensive care nurses, is smiling and nodding. They are packed into a hotel ballroom to learn how to laugh again, to hear that humor is not only OK but crucial even in a field as serious as theirs.

It's a message that corporate America is hearing more and more. Humor consultants such as McGhee are being hired in companies nationwide to inspire an overworked and anxious workforce.

The good humorists are trying to persuade companies that laughter is the color needed in an often-gray corporate world. A little daily fun, they say, reduces stress, boosts creativity and builds teamwork.

"Humor gives you bounce-back-ability," says McGhee, a lanky psychologist who has studied laughter for 20 years. "And these days you have no choice but to see a light side of things."

The nurses love him. In between seminars on fluid resuscitation and liver failure at their annual conference, they hoot and giggle as he hangs a chair from his neck to represent the worries they carry to and from work.

He gives them "remedial work" on belly laughs: smile, squint, raise your eyebrows, drop your lower jaw, tighten your stomach muscles and laugh. He tells them jokes:

A managed care consultant who died couldn't believe his good fortune when he woke up in heaven. He asked St. Peter to check that he was really slated to be there. After looking in his big book, St. Peter replied, "Yes, you're supposed to be here, but you're only authorized for three days."

But parts of McGhee's talk are also serious. He cites increasing medical evidence that laughter boosts the immune system, reduces stress and even pain, and helps keep people well.

Popular interest in the field leaped after magazine editor Norman Cousins published a book in 1979 on how he found relief from a painful spine disease by steeping himself in comic television and movies.

Today, Dr. Lee Berk and Dr. Stanley Tan at Loma Linda University Medical Center are looking further into the power of laughter. They found that people who watch funny videos experience a drop in stress hormones and a boost in immune system activity.

Together, Berk, McGhee, nurse Patty Wooten and neurologist Dr. Barry Bittman have created a computer questionnaire called Subjective Multidimensional Interactive Laughter Evaluation or "SMILE" to help people boost their sense of humor.

The five hope to sell the program, which will be released this June, to corporations and hospitals. "SMILE will survey humor preferences, coping styles and help tailor a personalized humor approach," says Bittman.

Many of the other humor consultants now working in corporations started out in medical or psychological fields.

Elaine Lundberg worked as a special education teacher, then with stroke and brain damage patients before becoming a "humor therapist."

Increasingly, she is hired by corporations suffering from low morale, cutbacks, buyouts, or those holding Wellness Days. "A lot of my business is because of downsizing," she notes.

During her seminars, she encourages her audiences to put humor back into the work day by sending e-mail jokes, using funny Post-it notes and giving shoulder massages to co-workers.

"Sometimes I just have to give people permission to laugh," she says.

McGhee coaches people to look out for the style of humor that tickles them most, then practice telling jokes, finding funny headlines, laughing at themselves and using humor to defuse stress.

"Humor is a set of skills," he says. "For some people, it's unnatural. They're the people who need a concrete set of skills."

Most humorists aren't as academic in their advice. Yet even a single shot of humor can be helpful.

After Boston Scientific Corp. acquired nine firms in one year - changes that resulted in the company using 12 different computer systems - the company hired former stand-up comic Brian Powers to address its annual controller's meeting.

Impersonating a mergers and acquisitions consultant, Powers - who charges up to $6,000 for a 45-minute performance - dubs the company's Worldwide Controllers Corp. "WACO" and lampoons top executives for not having dress-down days.

"People are still saying how wonderful it was," manager Danielle Benson recalls. "People walked away with the feeling that there's more to life than work."