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." Mean while, 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 grown up 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.
Laugh in the Face of Fear
Using humor to diffuse tension is a survival skill that was practiced adroitly by members of the medical team on the popular TV series Actor Alan Alda's Hawkeye Pierce is especially memorable for his ability to crack terrific one-liners under pressure. Of course, he also had the benefit of great writers. This was not true for the real-life Capt. Alfred Haynes, a 33-year veteran with United Airlines. One hour into a flight from Denver to Chicago one July afternoon in 1989, his plane's rear engine exploded, requiring an emergency landing in Sioux City, Iowa.
Haynes was trying to maneuver his DC-10 with 296 passengers aboard safely onto the ground using only the engine thrust. As he did so, he was in contact with an air-traffic controller who advised him that he was cleared to land on any run way. At that point, Haynes was just hoping he wouldn't end up in a cornfield. So he laughed and said: "You want to be particular and make it a runway?"
When you're able to call forth humor under such dire circumstances, it provides an important emotional outlet, allowing you to retain your sanity. As Abe Lincoln once said (paraphrasing Byron), "I laugh because I must not cry."
