Humor for Fun and Profit : Speaker Teaches Business of Lightening Up, Laughing All the Way to the Bank

Listen to this guy; hear him.

“Woody Allen was once asked what he would like people to say about him 100 years from now. He said: ‘I would like them to say, “He looks good for his age.” ’ “

“The only difference between most business meetings and a funeral is you know why you’re at a funeral . . . and you get away sooner. At a meeting you stay there till the leg of the highest-ranking member falls asleep.”

On stress: “You’ve got to turn it into a positive force. With humor. Like the religious ad on the bus-stop bench: ‘Where will you be on Judgment Day?’ Somebody had scrawled below, ‘Right here, waiting on this damned bus!’ ”

The generation gap: “I told my daughter the other day, there’s two words I want you to stop using. One is awesome, and the other is gross. ‘Wow!’ my daughter says, ‘so what are they?’ ”

And: “Safe sex? In my day, it meant not getting caught by your parents.”

A night at the Improv? Nope. This is 8 o’clock in the morning. A convention breakfast at Le Meridien hotel in Coronado. But this isn’t just humor. This is humor for profit , humor for longevity in corporate life.

The capeless crusader courageously being hearty before 80 bleary-eyed breakfasters from Greeting Cards of America is a guy you’d easily mistake for the actor who plays the stocky Stuart Markowitz on “L. A. Law.”

On Edge of Success

His name is Bob Ross, a resident of Bonita and San Diego’s newest scion of the speaking industry. Hovering, as he speaks, on the edge of the industry’s big time. He’s a man with an aphorism on everything, from junk bonds to bail bonds.

It’s one thing being funny with a drink-warmed nighttime crowd, but breakfast sessions can be a humorist’s most dreaded nightmare, like looking out at a tree full of owls or a herd of stunned oxen.

This Greeting Cards of America crowd started slow, having trouble enough coordinating hand with mouth, knife with butter and croissants. But now the eggs sit cooling, ignored, as Ross exhorts them to go back home and yell, “I’m not going to take life seriously anymore!”

Of course, he’s serious. It is soon clear that this isn’t just a joke session. The guy has a message. In fact, he’s almost messianic about it: Life should be, well, fun . Laughing, like sex and football,

needs practice to be enjoyable. But, unlike sex and football, having fun will actually make you money. Laugh, Ross says, and the world laughs with you--maybe all the way to the bank. Fun equals success!

“I’m fighting the ‘sergeant-major’ type of mentality that afflicts so many corporations,” Ross tells the crowd. “They rule by fear! They’re telling their employees to operate in a ‘closed’ fashion. You’re made to feel it’s too risky to stick your neck out. You become a cipher. Your abilities are being starved. You learn to copy the group’s behavior, and you shrivel into half the man or woman you could be. And your corporation consequently becomes half the corporation it could be.

“Whereas fun stimulates the opposite reaction--people open up! They develop an open way of approaching work, which is the mode that produces good ideas, original thinking and spontaneous energy.”

So work should be play?

“Sure,” Ross says. “The difference between work and play is simply one of attitude. If your employees are coming to work in the morning with the feeling that this is their punishment for not marrying rich . . . there’s no way you’re going to get excellence.”

And here come the icons.

“John F. Kennedy had it right. Every meeting he came to he’d say, ‘I’m healthy, I’m happy and I’m here to have fun.’ Then he’d have (the others) say it, too.”

Ross evokes Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca, Apple Chief Administrative Officer John Sculley and others who promote informality and fun for the sake of productivity.

Potential Victims

The rest of us, says Ross, are potential victims of the fastest-growing killer of our time: stress. Statistics show that six of the 10 leading causes of death are stress-related.

“Stress is not an event,” Ross says. “Stress is our reaction to the event. But we can turn that stress into positive energy if we can learn to find the humor in it. Turn stress pro ducers into stress re ducers.”

He regales his 80 listeners with inspiring stories of how Apple holds “beer busts” every Friday afternoon, just to inject good humor into the workplace; how John F. Kennedy, even during the Cuban missile crisis, insisted on humor at all times. “Right then, at the height of the crisis,” Ross says, “President Kennedy had someone tell a joke to start off his meetings, just to break down that tension.”

Ross, 53, was himself the victim of too much tension when he decided to quit his inner-city urban renewal government job to try to penetrate this toughest of brotherhoods: the lecture industry, a floating population of speakers roving the country’s conventions and clubs, earning anywhere from $25 to $25,000 a lecture. He already had a Rolodex full of jokes. He’d been a Toastmaster for some time and had been collecting laugh lines for about six years as a hobby. He started out his new venture purely as a humorist.

“I set a three-year internship for myself,” he says. “I decided I’d speak to a minimum of 25 service clubs in the first year. Doing stand-up routines to the Lions. Roasts of local heroes.”

But Ross soon realized that, in the big world of the lecture circuit, filled with get-rich-quick sharks, one-minute managers, nothing-down property kings, efficiency experts, he had to have something , an angle to offer people more than just a good half-hour’s laugh.

Read a Seminal Book

Then he read a seminal book: Sculley’s “Odyssey,” about his life running Pepsi and then Apple, and discovering that fun actually helped productivity. Hence his Friday beer bust, and naming Apple’s seven conference rooms after the Seven Deadly Sins.

“Can you imagine?” says Ross. “ ‘Let’s meet in “Lust” at 11 . . . ‘ That book really hit home to me. I began to realize that our culture, our Protestant work ethic, teaches us to be serious. Too serious. Dead serious. . . . Death comes earlier because we’re so stressed out.

“But, especially now, when more people’s work requires them to think, having fun doing it is actually smarter and healthier. Take it from any viewpoint. Just medically, doctors are beginning to realize that there are connections between the mind and the body. Psycho-neuro-immunology is now being recognized. ‘Smile.’ This would have sounded ridiculous a few years back; ‘Smile and you send endorphins around your body, which actually boost your immune system and help you fight the stresses placed on you by the pressures in your life.’ ”

Emulates Norman Cousins

Ross loves to quote Norman Cousins, the man who said, “A hospital’s no place to be when you’re sick.”

“The doctors had condemned him, but he determined to help himself by giving himself 20 minutes of laughter a night. That, he discovered, gave him two hours of painless sleep. Now they’re starting to put laugh rooms in hospitals--just to get the endorphins going in patients’ bodies. Hell, the message has to get out! Fifty-two percent of these professional people I speak to are going to die of stress-related problems.”

So he isn’t about to let these greeting carders off lightly. He bombards them with practical fun-action-plans. They should go out and buy spark plugs to engrave and give to meeting members who “spark” best. They should initiate lotteries to bet on what time late employees will arrive: pressure through fun.

He even likens the benefits of fun and humor to judo, something he spent much of his life teaching. Both have the ability to help a person cushion aggression and bounce back on a positive note. And, naturally, he laces it all with humor: “Every time I see a story about a plane crash and see how they always recover that black box successfully, I always ask myself why on earth they don’t make the whole plane from the same material.

“We should make all those people with bumper stickers on their cars saying ‘I New York’ feel at home. At the red light, we should get out and mug them.

On Mildew:

“Do you notice how, on things like mildew remover sprays, they always say, ‘Spray only in dry, airy places?’

“It has been scientifically proven: Bills sent by mail travel 2 1/2 times faster than checks.

“You don’t believe in the power of advertising? They’ve got millions of you believing yogurt tastes good.”

By hour’s end, his audience is ruddy-cheeked and sparkling-eyed.

“You may as well have fun while you’re living your life anyway,” Ross concluded. “Life is a sexually transmitted disease that has no known cure.”

Post-Talk Stress

Over in the hotel’s bay-side cafe 10 minutes later, Ross is sipping a coffee and soul-searching. Did he get his sugar-and-pill balance right? Did he maybe spend too long on the stress dangers at the start?

“Hi Bob! Gerreat! I was in the back there. Did you see me?”

“Sure, sure,” Ross says, looking a little uncomfortable.

The guy sits down and, quicker than a snake can blink, plunks a wad of literature on the table. A cassette tape plops on top: “Johnsonian Strategy: Being The Best. The Science of Innovation in Action.” Pete Johnson, the convention’s next speaker, is a heavy in the speech industry. What he says counts with Ross, the relative newcomer. Johnson is rumored to have gotten $8,000 for a 45-minute conference speech the week before.

“Bob is, uh, what they call a change-of-pace speaker,” Johnson confides. “Someone they put on to lighten up the atmosphere. I couldn’t do the charming and funny speeches he does. Uh, Bob, I think you need flip-sheets so you can emphasize what you’re saying. Write it up! You should watch the program I do sometime . . . plus always give them something to take away. Like ‘Fifteen Keys to Making Your Personal and Professional Life a Better Place to Be.’ It means they won’t forget what you’ve told them--and, they won’t forget you . Good for business!”

Full of Advice

The Johnsonian strategy continues at dictation speed, with quotes from the galaxy of “Made Its” like Ray Kroc (the McDonald’s story: “Grinding It Out”).

“You’re way up on last time I heard you, Bob. Uh, on that stress thing, you might, say, compare it to AIDS. Punch out the difference. Tell them stress is going to kill millions more than AIDS. The biggest killer! . . . Oh yeah, there are people that die from hunger, but they’re not people that you or I know, Bob.”

Ross has a notebook out, jotting down the suggestions. “ ‘Course, my style is different,” Johnson says. “I believe in being awesome. Gross overkill. Absolutely annihilate the audience. We don’t release anything that is not awesome. For 10 minutes before I’m introduced, I concentrate . I go right inside. Like a meditation. So when I come out, bang! Shot out of the cannon! My style is the preemptive strike. Energy! I want them to say, ‘He did it on raw horsepower.’ ”

Up in the corridor, on the way out, Bob Ross confides it was tough having the great Pete Johnson there. Still, at least the crowd wasn’t that tree full of owls, the dreaded herd of stunned oxen. Quite the opposite. Those laughs and the handshakes he got at the end were what counted most.

Well, almost the most. Actually, what counts most is the accidental meeting with a smiling lady right here in the corridor. “You were very good, Mr. Ross,” she says, shaking his hand. This is no ordinary lady. She is an agent. The booking agent who suggests and books speakers to a pile of organizations. Someone, in other words, from very near the right hand of the pro speakers’ God. “We’re looking for ways to use you again.”

“That,” laughs Bob Ross, as he emerges into the sunlit hotel water gardens near the pink flamingos, “will keep me high for three days.”