She Turns Laughter Into Life’s Work : Profile: Jan Marshall believes that humor can help cure many ills. So she founded an institute to promote it.
When it comes to a good laugh, Jan Marshall gets serious:
“In every way, the purpose of the International Humor Institute is to use humor as a communicating device--to connect people with humor, rather than separate. And so we are totally against any kind of humor that attacks. Ageist, sexist, racist--it’s out.”
And when it comes to being serious, Marshall is always ready for a good laugh:
“Let’s say you’re going to work and you’re not looking forward to it. You need something to remind you to lighten up . So I always carry a kazoo.”
Marshall, fortysomething, is a longtime Studio City-based author, motivational speaker and humor consultant. She also is the founder and president of the International Humor Institute, which, among other things, annually honors 10 people worldwide who have made the most “positive contribution” to humanity. The institute is dedicated to the proposition that all things are not created serious.
“Look,” Marshall said. “Our philosophy has always been the credo, ‘Not a shred of evidence exists that life is serious.’ And it’s true! Show me where it says life has to be serious.”
Quick to smile and motherly, Marshall was a onetime humor columnist for the then-Valley News in Van Nuys in the late 1970s and the author of a 1979 book, “Still Hanging in There . . . Confessions of a Totaled Woman” (Pinnacle Books). She began the Humor Institute in 1986 as an umbrella organization for her various pursuits. Although it boasts a distinguished board of directors, including John Cleese and Larry King (they lent their names but do not actively participate), the institute is largely a one-woman band--a fancy way of allowing Marshall to pursue her various projects with greater clout.
She has a partner--Joyce Dove in Florida, who handles the business end of things--and she uses three consultants. But it is Marshall who makes the institute run.
Advisers help come up with nominees for the annual Top 10 positive contributors, but the final cut is Marshall’s to make. The institute’s 1990 honorees, announced Dec. 31: Kevin Costner, Prince Charles, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Hope, Earvin (Magic) Johnson, Vladimir Pozner, Robin Williams, Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Bush. Barbara Bush? One doesn’t readily think of her as a barrel of laughs.
“That’s true,” Marshall said, “but she really is a warm, caring person who often uses humor to balance serious issues. She
puts people at ease. She’s very well liked and admired.”
Magic Johnson was picked because “who else in the world has a smile like that?” The rest: Prince Charles because “he sees the absurdities of his own life, and he shows that you can be royal and still be funny”; Costner for using humor to bring out the humanity of the Indians in “Dances With Wolves”; Pozner for being the first Russian journalist to help “build a bridge” to the West, “and doing it with humor”; Winfrey for “sharing her vulnerability” and “helping us to laugh at ourselves”; Hope because of his undying efforts to boost morale, and Goldberg, Crystal and Williams for their work on behalf of the homeless. All were sent gold plaques and letters of congratulations adorned with the institute’s logo, a dove of peace with a wry smirk.
Their reactions? Unknown. In fact, Marshall admits that she does not often hear from her nominees--and doesn’t know for sure that they ever realize they’ve been chosen. (Awards are sometimes thrown into the fan letter bag, according to Marshall.) This year, Marshall did receive a call from an assistant to Costner acknowledging the award.
Yet this does not daunt her; indeed, nothing much seems to. The woman is, after all, a survivor of breast cancer. She believes that she defeated it, at least in part, with positive thinking a la her friend, the late Norman Cousins, who remains listed on the institute’s board of advisers. A homemade medal is pinned to her lapel to remind herself of the triumph.
“Why not wear a medal?” Marshall said with a smile. “I survived a war. I give these medals to other friends who’ve survived cancer. . . .”
She plays down the illness of 16 months ago, preferring not to let it define her. But she does comment about Cousins’ philosophy of curing oneself with funny movies and positive thinking.
“I used those techniques when I could,” she said. “I mean, there’s a time when you can’t --when you’re immersed in chemotherapy, and your hair’s falling out and all these disgusting things. But I know that the techniques work--there’s a mind-body connection. . . . You know, I just saw this cartoon in the Wall Street Journal. There were two guys from the FDA. One was saying, ‘Hey, if laughter is the best medicine, shouldn’t we be regulating it?’ ”
Added Dr. Gail Brockman, a Century City endocrinologist who treated Marshall and who is also an institute adviser: “Jan’s an amazing woman. She developed cancer and has been able to focus her energies very much in the healing process. Her healing remedies were well set even before she had directed them toward herself--and that has given her a much better handle in facing what she had to face. Without having had this involvement, it would have been much harder for her.”
Steve Allen, another institute adviser, also praised Marshall: “Much of Jan’s thinking . . . is based on Norman Cousins’ work as explained in his ‘Anatomy of an Illness.’ Cousins simply enlarged upon what a number of thinkers over the centuries had already assumed anyway, and that is that humor is an absolutely necessary human function. I encourage and admire Jan in her work.”
Marshall shrugged.
“You do what you can do,” she said. “Then, of course, life has its own way of working. My grandmother had a saying in Yiddish which meant ‘Man plans, God laughs.’ So you just go.”
Marshall occasionally advises businessmen on how to lighten up, with tips on everything from decorating to healthier boss-employee relationships.
But it is her dream of establishing “humor rooms” in hospitals that is the institute’s current priority. Marshall has pitched the idea to several Los Angeles hospitals, but as yet to no avail because of lack of space or funding, she said.
Humor rooms exist in hospitals around the country, according to Allen, but not the way Marshall envisions them.
Under her direction, such rooms would be stocked with comedy tapes, videos, music, games and live entertainment, and staffed by therapists and volunteer comics “to get people back into a frame of mind when things were better,” Marshall said. Such rooms would be “decorated in healing colors--certain colors that affect us positively, pastels that are memory joggers to happier days.” Further, Marshall said she would employ “lighting that is gentle and healing, and subliminal sounds, like maybe a waterfall” so that walking into such a room would be “like going into a warm bath--just a pleasurable experience to take patients out of their mode of illness, or to relieve the Angst of nurses, doctors and technicians.”
Not surprisingly, Marshall’s health concerns are hardly limited to the afflicted. She is quick to offer advice to anyone for dealing with stress and adversity:
“A helpful hint for going through a rough time is to nag. Write letters. Call the people. Don’t put up with stuff. When your life seems like it’s out of control, you need to take back some of that and empower yourself! Sometimes it’s simply a matter of writing a letter to a paper, or to the president of the company, and not putting up with it.”
But isn’t nagging a bit . . . undignified?
“One of the speeches I do is called ‘In Defense of Nagging.’ Plato was a nag. Plato and the Platitudes was the first rap group. You’ve never heard? Confucius--was he not a nag? Anyway, in their days, nags were called philosophers. Nagging is the second-oldest profession.”