Frontiers Friday #125: Humour (Part III)🤪⭕️
Learning from Trevor Noah, a comedian, and Bobby McFerrin, who is not a comedian, but who will make you laugh!
Why watch comedians?
They're funny. (duh)
They disarm.
They give voice to unspoken truths.
We can learn from them to be craftsman at our craft.
This week, we learn from Trevor Noah, a comedian, and Bobby McFerrin, who is not a comedian, but who will make you laugh!
(Sidenote: Big thanks to Rachel Moore for inviting me to the Podcast called Artist's Block. We covered grounds about how to help creatives. It's a topic I care a lot about--and I had a blast. Stay tuned for the release of this conversation in April.)
Happy Friday! This is Part III on the topic of Humour, with five more recommendations.
📽 Watch: Bobby McFerrin Try This at Home
I first recommended this in FF98: Emotions and the Voice. Here's what I blurbed:
I must have watched this more than a dozen times.
Watch how Bobby McFerrin (yep, the guy who sang Don't Worry, Be Happy) takes to the stage with no pre-conceived idea what he's gonna sing. Instead, he gathers what the audiences bring, and makes music with them in real-time, using nothing but the voice. Talk about engagement!
I bring this up in this list particularly because I wanted to highlight how powerful it is to say someone's name. Watch this segment starting around 14:20.
As I think about this, some years ago, on an outreach with a 15-yr-old, because he had also watched this Bobby McFerrin performance, we ended up making our own improvised act together. We looked like complete fools impersonating Elvis, rapping and singing made up lyrics on the fly. At that time, I didn't quite know where all of this was leading to. Is this even therapy? I met him about 7 years on, he remembers this.It turned out to be fertile grounds for our work together. It opened up the door to talking about his mother, whom he had lost as a child.
For more about Bobby McFerrin, listen to his interview with Krista Tippett, On Being. It is a real treat to listen to what guides him.📽 Watch: Son of Patricia by Trevor Noah
Trevor is a 39-year-old South African Comedian and former TV host of the Daily Show. (His birthday happens to be on this day that I'm writing this, 20th of Feb). Here, he weaves stories about his Xhosa mother, his Swiss-German father, his exposure to domestic violence, snakes, camping, racism immunity, and so much more!Another previous recommendation from FF98, is his standup comedy Afraid of the Dark.
His impressions of accents are hilarious. His imaginary dialogue with Nelson Mandela teaching Barack Obama how to use his voice was sooo good – as well as his take on why speaking with a Russian accent should be taught to girls as a defense strategy.
Here's a short compilation of his standups from Netflix.
📽 Watch: The 60 Minutes Interview with Trevor Noah
If you have followed Frontiers Friday long enough, you’d have figured that I often trying to get to the backstory. Here, Trevor Noah talks to 60 Minutes about his roots, his feelings of being an outsider, and how he became a voracious reader.
😂 Laugh: Doctor and Patient Knowledge
Allen Frances was the Chair of APA task force overseeing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV, who became critical of the over-medicalisation of normal human behaviour and spoke out against DSM-V.
Frances said,"Mental disorders are constructs, not diseases. Descriptive, not explanatory. Helpful in communication/treatment planning, but no claims re causality/ homogeneity/clear boundaries. We wrote this in DSM-IV Intro--no one read it."
Here's one of his tweets:
Here's one of the early articles I read about Frances, which was written by Gary Greenberg, who also wrote an exposé of the psychiatric profession’s bible called The Book of Woe: The DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry.
⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:
Jerry Seinfeld, in the documentary Comedian (see FF124), said to his audience while he was testing out new materials,“Can you believe you’re in charge of deciding whether our brilliant ideas are good or not?”
Reflection
Don't be too quick to name things. Experience it, deeply, specifically and slowly.
Worry less about the nouns.
Be the verb, and share it.
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Daryl Chow Ph.D. is the author of The First Kiss, co-author of Better Results, and The Write to Recovery, Creating Impact, and the forthcoming book The Field Guide to Better Results (APA, 23rd of May 2023).
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