The Benefits of Using Humor in the Clinical Setting

Ray Ramirez, DVM, owner and speaker of Ramirezdvm.com, discusses the benefits of using humor in the clinical setting.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“The three things that [humor] does is that it helps to bond the person to you. It’s a shared experience that we caught the little slight that made it funny. The second thing is that it helps to convey a message. The third thing, kind of along with the first, is that it gives a common situation that we are all familiar with and so you laugh about that [common] situation. It is really what makes everybody want to watch the Super Bowl commercials. What is the funny Super Bowl commercial that everyone remembers? Even though we are not in the same room, we have that same experience of viewing the commercial, and ‘getting it’ as far as why it was funny, and that’s the thing that we share. And, that is why sometimes, some of those commercials ‘bomb’ [because the audience] does not always ‘get it’. That is one of the ideas that I use in my examples because if you miss one part of the buildup of tension, then the rest of the joke, or story that you are sharing doesn’t make any sense.”