If you've been doing the things (the "Homeplay")I've suggested in the past several months of Humor Your Tumor, you've probably already noticed that you've just naturally become more interested in playing with words than you used to be. Language is essential to communicating most humor, but is also an important source of humor in its own right.

Jokes often involve playing with the language itself--but not always. The reason for devoting the next two columns to word play is that jokes are generally memorized. They do not require you to use your own spontaneous skills at creating humor. Verbal humor becomes a true coping skill when you're able to come up with your own funny lines on the spot. For a more detailed discussion of how to create your own verbal humor, see Step 4 of my Humor Skills Training Program, presented in Health, Healing and the Amuse System: Humor as Survival Training.

While it's hard to remember it now, if you were like most kids, you got hooked on riddles in the first and second grade. You just couldn't get enough of them, and you would repeat the same one over and over--driving your parents nuts in the process. (If you're a parent yourself, you'll remember this stage in your own kids.) The reason riddles appear at this age all over the world is that this is the point at which children become intellectually capable of keeping two things in mind at the same time. Most kids are very excited about the discovery that a word can have two meanings, and that you can trick people with those meanings if you go about it in the right way.

The basis for many riddles is puns. Although we often groan at puns (precisely because they're generally seen as a low level of humor), this is one of the best places to begin cultivating your verbal sense of humor. Chances are that it's where you left off in developing your own sense of humor in elementary school.

A woman calls her doctor up and says, "Doctor, doctor, I just swallowed a spoon! What should I do?"

The doctor says, "Sit down and don't stir."

Two woman walk into one of the few remaining men's clubs in the country, and the waiter comes over and says, "I'm sorry ladies, but we only serve men here."

One of the women says, "That's OK, we'll take two."

You probably didn't fall off your chair laughing at either of these jokes. But think of your friends who are always doing puns. Have you noticed that they think they're really pretty funny, even though you don't? Puns are often funnier to the person who thinks them up, because it takes more mental effort to think of a pun on the spot than it does to understand it once it's told to you.

Puns are also funnier when you're having a bad day, and need a good laugh. Have you even found yourself laughing hard at something, but your mind was also telling you that it wasn't really that funny? This shows the wisdom of the body in recognizing when it needs a good cleansing laugh. We always feel better when we have this kind of laugh.

So these are two good reasons for you to use puns as the starting point to boost your verbal humor skills, even though puns may seem like a low level of humor. And remember, the goal here is not to improve your ability to play with language so that you can keep your friends and loved ones rolling on the floor with laughter. The goal is to develop some basic skills that will enable you to take control over your mood and frame of mind, so that when you're having a bad day and could use a good laugh you can use your own spontaneous wit to create your own humor.

Next month, we'll focus on how to build up your skills at creating puns. For now, just practice looking for ambiguity in everyday conversations. For example, if your host for dinner is serving chicken, and at some point looks into the oven and says, "Ok, the chicken is ready to eat," what might you say? Don't worry about whether the ambiguity you spot is funny; just develop the habit of finding words that can be interpreted in more than one way.

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