Using humour as a pick-me-up

Warren_B — Fri, 15 May 2015 11:13:01 GMT

One of the ways I pick myself up is by using humour. (I've also used it to try to pick up other people, but that's another story...)

So I was interested to know whether other people also use humour, either humour created by other people or self-created humour. (Sometimes its easier to turn ourselves on...).

Humour can be a hard balance, because you don't want to offend people but I quite enjoy the word play you see used by advertisers where there are multiple meanings. Then you can act all innocent if someone gets offended.

Just as an example, in a Share Point post about mental health that I added in the very large organisation I work in, I recently quoted the following lines from the old Smokie song:

Something's been making me blue;

And somehow I can't talk it over with you.

There were three different meanings of the word 'blue' I was using in those quoted lines:

1. I knew I had some kind of mental health problem including the 'blues' (depression) but wasn't sure what it was at the time. Just this week, I received a bipolar diagnosis and am possibly on the Autism Spectrum Disorder as well.

2. My mental health problems and some other factors were causing me to 'blue' (argue) a lot with other colleagues.

3. 'Blue' also refers to adult movies etc ('blue movies') so I put some innuendo in the background in the post,which people always enjoy and advertisers often use a lot.

I also write fairly lame jokes, like the following knock knock joke:

Knock knock

Who's there?

Empathy

Empathy who?

Who cares?

I care

And then, once I'm sick of my own lame humour, I turn to the professionals, like the great Robin Williams. I'm just about to watch a DVD of one of his stand-up jokes tonight. The back of the DVD talks about Robin Williams (who we knew had some mental health issues) having, in this performance, "pranced, flounced, minced, pounced, zigzagged, hip-hopped, whirled and twirled, talking nonstop about everything fro surgically enhanced breasts to the great anthrax scare". Sounds exactly like a few of the manic episodes I had a few weeks ago before the meds started calming me down a bit.

Anyhow, I'm interested to know whether humour helps other people with their blues as well. We won't all have the same taste in jokes (particularly the 'adult blue' ones...) but I think humour is something that can be helpful for everyone. It lifts our moods, and that can only be a good thing, right?

Using humour as a pick-me-up

white knight — Sat, 16 May 2015 09:53:15 GMT

Hi Warren B, welcome to Beyond Blue forums

topic Using humour as a pick-me-up in Staying well

Using humour as a pick-me-up

Using humour as a pick-me-up