I saw this pretty funny comedy a few weeks ago on Netflix.
Called “Punching the Clown.”
About this comedian who had a weird style.
He would play these goofy songs on stage, and in the songs would be his routine.
The story was a parody of sorts, and it was about his “rise and fall” in Hollywood.
It started with him living in his car, and ended the same.
One of the funniest parts was when he was pitching his routine to some big shot media executive.
The exec kept interrupting him.
The hero would start one of his “joke songs” but before he got a couple of lines out, the exec would stop him.
“Ok, how about your FUNNIEST joke then?” he would say.
The joke was that jokes are usually only funny if you don’t see them coming.
Even stand up comedians have to keep the jokes coming so fast it’s hard to keep up.
This is how humor works.
Our brains HAVE to be off balance.
The media exec was treating jokes as a physical thing. As if the “funniness” of a joke was objective and could be measured.
As if you could take out all your jokes, lay them on the table, and line them up on order of funniness.
But if you’ve ever successfully told a joke, you know that sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t.
The the best way to tell a joke isn’t to wait for a lull in the conversation, and then say, “OK, everybody, I just learned this new joke, pay close attention!”
That would almost GUARANTEE nobody would laugh.
So we instinctively know that we keep our jokes on ice until the right time to spring them.
If you’ve got a lot of witty one liners, you aren’t in any rush to get them out.
You wait until a relevant point in the conversation, say them and BECAUSE they are unexpected, they will have the biggest impact.
Example:
I was sitting around with my friends once. We were talking about life after death. Serious subject! Everybody was trying to outdo each other with our deep metaphysical insight.
Then my friend says, (totally seriously), “I hear we become moths after we die.”
We all looked at him.
What?
“Yeah, that’s why people that come back say they kept going toward a big light…”
Now, this is likely one of the lamest jokes you’ll ever hear. But said at JUST the right moment, it will make people laugh.
Which is EXACTLY how hypnosis works.
Sure, there’s DIRECT hypnosis, where you TELL the person you are hypnotizing them.
Then there is INDIRECT, or covert hypnosis.
The problem is many people treat “covert hypnosis” like the Punching the Clown Executive.
They tell everybody they are about to DO hypnosis.
Which kills the effect.
But when you USE HYPNOSIS like the moth joke (spring it when people least expect it) it will spin their minds around like crazy.
And unlike jokes, which are short, you can make hypnosis as LONG as you want.
