Ha! (29 page)

In short, humor is key not only in mate selection but for maintaining healthy partnerships too. Relationships take work, and an excellent way to spot a mind willing to put in the effort is to look for a good sense of humor. Nine out of ten couples say that humor is an important part of their relationship. Compared to those in dysfunctional marriages, couples in strong ones also say that they value and appreciate their partner's humor more. Indeed, studies examining long-term couples—those who have remained together for forty-five years or more—have found that laughing together is essential for marital success.

Humor appears to be as important for establishing healthy relationships as it is for maintaining healthy bodies and minds. Just as a humorous attitude signals an engaged mind, a shared appreciation for humorous living signals a fit partnership or marriage. A good sense of humor is more than a perspective or outlook. It's a means of sharing expectations with someone close to us.

So, humor dances—and there's no better way to build a solid relationship than finding somebody who dances to the same rhythm.

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Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How any of them will own up to a lack of humour?

—F
RANK
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OLBY

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HIS FINAL CHAPTER OPENS WITH A STORY, AND AN UNUSUAL
one at that. It's the tale of an arm-wrestling match between two CEOs, held in front of a huge audience to determine the ownership of an advertising slogan. It's an unusual turn for a book on humor, but it shows how humor is everywhere.

It isn't every day that major companies settle legal disputes over an arm-wrestling match, but Stevens Aviation and Southwest Airlines aren't your typical companies. The event in question started when Southwest began using the phrase “Just Plane Smart” in its advertising campaign. The slogan matched Southwest's smart and irreverent personality and was a big success, except for one problem. Stevens Aviation, an aircraft
maintenance firm based in South Carolina, was already using it. Actually, Stevens Aviation was using “Plane Smart,” but the two slogans were close enough that lawyers quickly became involved. Disputes like this are common and usually end with one side giving up its slogan, but Southwest's CEO Herb Kelleher had another idea—he personally challenged Stevens's CEO Kurt Herwald to an arm-wrestling match. Company employees would be the spectators, and all money raised by the event would go to charity. The winner of the match would keep the slogan, while the loser would explain to his board of directors why he lost the rights. It was the kind of challenge no smart businessman turns down—especially one like Herwald, who was young, athletic, and an avid body builder.

To appreciate the audacity of the challenge, you should know that Kelleher is the opposite of a body builder. In training videos he flaunted his pudgy, nearly forty-year-old body, softened by alcohol and tobacco. Cigarette in mouth, he trained for the match by lifting bottles of Wild Turkey whiskey. It took three stewardesses to help Kelleher complete a sit-up in his videotaped preparation for the match.

The “Malice in Dallas,” as it came to be known, was held on a sunny morning in late March 1992 at the Dallas Sportatorium, in front of hundreds of fans. Crowds chanted “Herb! Herb! Herb!” as Kelleher arrived, his gut barely covered by a poorly tied bathrobe. Kelleher's right arm hung in a sling due to an injury he got “while saving a little girl from being hit while running across the I-35 freeway.” He also complained of suffering from a weeklong cold, as well as athlete's foot, but this didn't stop him from lunging at Herwald as he entered the ring. Officials had to restrain both CEOs.

“We don't need no stinkin' lawyers, we're going to do this like real men. In the ring,” called the announcer. The fight was on.

In a business world where publicity can be a company's biggest asset, the event was already gold. Hundreds of people had come to watch
the event, and so had dozens of television stations, including CNN and the BBC. Making sure to put on a show, Kelleher started by presenting a substitution order from the supreme court of Texas. In his place would be Texas professional arm-wrestling champion J. R. Jones. Herwald objected, but officials ignored his complaints—and Southwest won the first of three matches. At this point, Herwald announced, “If they can bring in a ringer, I can bring in a ringer,” and brought out his own substitute. But instead of calling upon a professional, Herwald introduced “Killer” Annette Coats, a tiny Stevens Aviation customer representative who weighed maybe half as much as Kelleher. Still, she won the second match handily.

By this time the event had turned into mayhem. Herwald ended up beating Kelleher in the third and final match, but not surprisingly Kelleher protested and things started to get strange. For reasons not entirely clear, a professional wrestler jumped into the ring and began choking Kelleher, and as Kelleher fell to the ground Herwald returned to the ring to defend him from the muscle-bound man in tights. A brief scuffle ensued, and in the end Kelleher and Herwald chased away the spandexed intruder, finally ending the dispute with a shake of the hands.

“Just to show there's no hard feelings, or to be accused of taking advantage of senior citizens,” Herwald announced as things settled down. “We've decided to allow Southwest Airlines to continue the use of our slogan.
Our
slogan. In exchange for a $5,000 contribution to the Ronald McDonald house, which needs the money more than Southwest Airlines does.”

The event was indeed a publicity coup. It made Southwest and Stevens appear hip and funny and established Kelleher and Herwald as confident managers, willing to play the fool for the sake of their companies. When Kelleher was interviewed after the event—while sitting on an ambulance stretcher, of course—he was asked how much Southwest
would normally have paid for such advertising exposure. “Why, I never even thought about it in those terms,” he replied tongue-in-cheek. The president of the United States wrote Kelleher two days later to congratulate him on the brilliant idea.
BusinessWeek
and the
Chicago Tribune
wrote that Kelleher and Herwald's willingness to set aside stuffy business images to provide entertainment was one of the things that made Southwest so special. In fact, it was the only airline to make a profit in every one of its thirty-one years.

In this chapter, we're going to take a different approach to humor. It's good to know that our brains are conflict-processing machines, turning things like ambiguity and confusion into pleasure, but for those of us who just want to tell a good joke, it's time to look at humor as it is applied in the real world, seeing how people like Kelleher and Herwald play funny to their advantage. Humor makes us better workers, students, and managers, and it's important to recognize how it's used in each of these settings. It's also important to learn what science has done to help us maximize our humor potential.

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Something about the business world changed in the 1980s. Southwest Airlines was no longer the only company using humor in the workplace; companies all over the world began to recognize that humor sells. For instance, the newly hired president of New England Securities introduced himself to new employees by reading from the Dr. Seuss story “Oh, the Places You'll Go!” as a way of promoting the company's core values. The computer manufacturer Digital Equipment created a “grouch patrol” to roam the workplace and identify sour workers. And the San Francisco Police Department hired humor consultants to update its Neighborhood Crime Prevention workshops after learning that previous workshops had left residents
more
traumatized by crime, not less.

At a minimum, we know that such approaches improve employee morale. A survey by the Campbell Research Corporation found that 81
percent of the companies instituting programs like “casual Fridays” experienced improved mood in the workplace, and half saw concomitant improvements in productivity. Indeed, the idea that a laughing worker is a lazy worker became as outdated as the notion that being serious means never laughing. “No subject is ever too serious for humor,” says John Cleese, Monty Python member and founder of Video Arts, the largest producer of corporate training films in the world. “I think many people have a basic misunderstanding: There's a difference between being serious and being solemn.”

As it turns out, the difference between seriousness and solemnity is quite important in the professional world. Seriousness keeps us focused on improvement, and that's undoubtedly beneficial. Solemnity often achieves the same thing, but it does so by emphasizing formality and avoiding cheer. That's fine too, especially for certain situations where cheer would be inappropriate. But there are times when a bit of joviality is needed too.

Fortunately science
has
shown that joviality helps us at our jobs, and a wide variety of jobs at that. For example, being funny helps hide flaws in our organization skills. Most of the time when we give speeches, we're careful to organize our points in a logical and meaningful order. But studies have found that we can give those same speeches with points mixed at random, and as long as we also incorporate humor, viewers won't notice. When a healthy dose of jokes and humorous anecdotes are included among a jumble of ideas, the results can be just as informative as if they were well organized.