Chapter 6
Harnessing humor
This chapter highlights the importance of humor to deliver our content as either educational presenters or educators. Effective humor can be achieved, according to the author, by the following: recognizing and promoting neoteny in one's self, having an element of surprise in our delivery of humor, historical perspective (as in "someday you will think this is funny"). Dr. Burmark then continues to define humor into 3 components that she describes as Wit, Mirth, and Laughter. Wit is defined as the cognitive component; the one that "gets it". Mirth, in turn, is defined as the emotional response to humor; how it uplifts our spirits and allow us to forget our negative feelings. Laughter is simply the physical response to humor; it like dancing to music. But for humor to be effective in delivering content (the ultimate goal of educators) two things must happen. First, you as a presenter need to get you audience's attention. Second, you need to connect your humor to your content. Dr. Burmark remarks that one must know as a presenter that our main job is to deliver content. She then proceeds encouraging the reader to keep an open eye and capture humorous images to be used later in presentations. She continues by reminding the reader that many image sites, such as Flickr, also have video libraries. She finishes her chapter by absolutely endorsing humor as a way for content "to stick".
This was a fairly simple chapter with less content than the previous chapter. I guess that was her way of following chapter 5 which had much more content. I happen to agree with almost everything that Dr. Burmark states. To me it is self-evident, but I like the fact that she highlights the importance of adhering content to humor
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