I suggested in last month's Humor Your Tumor that puns generally aren't very funny to adults because most puns are understandable by the mid-elementary school years. But puns are usually much funnier when you're the one who makes them up, or when someone else's pun is told to you in the midst of a high stress day.

Since you probably have not made the effort to boost your own verbal humor skills since junior high school, puns are the ideal place to begin cultivating a skill that will help you manage your job stress (or other life stress) and sustain a frame of mind that is more conducing to handling the problem of the moment effectively. For the next few weeks, this column will provide a series of exercises designed to help you build up the habit of coming up with your own spontaneous puns and other verbal humor during everyday conversations with people. If you find some time every day to do these exercises, you (and your friends) will notice a gradual emergence of a more witty style to your everyday conversations.

Practice Looking for Extra Meanings of Words

Professional humorists have refined the art of effortlessly and immediately seeing other possible meanings of words that come up in everyday conversation. You too can develop this habit, and if you make an active effort to develop this skill, you'll find yourself coming up with your own puns in as little as 2-3 weeks.

A "pre-humor" exercise you can do (it won't be funny) to start building the mental habit of having extra meanings of words pop into your mind is to simply make a conscious effort to think of as many meanings as you can for a word. If you're waiting for an elevator and have 30 seconds free, you might look at objects around you for ideas for this exercise. For example, you see the light above the elevator. Stop reading this right now and write down as many different meanings as you can think of for the word "light."

There's light in color (as opposed to dark), low calorie (as in light beer), light weight, light a cigarette, "lighten up," and even a distance measure (light year)--not to mention the fixture which illuminates the room. There's obviously nothing funny about this, but this is the basic mental processes all comedians go through when creating this form of verbal humor. They don't have to consciously list these different meanings. The habit is so strongly ingrained in them that the extra meanings just pop into their mind. The same will happen to you after you put all the exercises described here on the "front burner" for a couple of weeks.

Once you've spent some time with this exercise, move on to looking for extra meanings in the conversations you have with people. Coming up with a comment that connects with the "wrong" meaning is the most important step in developing the quickness that most people associated with being witty.

For example, if you're on a plane and you hear the pilot say, "We'll be cruising at 37,000 feet and will briefly pass out over the lake as we leave Chicago," what might you say? Or if you're at a restaurant and a friend says there's a man eating octopus at the next table, what quip could you come up with? If you're listening to the radio and hear a report that says that because of all the accidents linked to alcohol, the mayor has asked police to stop drinking while driving, what might you say?

Don't worry at first about whether your idea is funny or not. Just develop the habit of noticing the extra meanings while continuing to carry on a conversation. when you're with someone with whom you feel very comfortable make your witty remark as soon as it pops into your mind. Your audience will be an accepting one, even if your joke doesn't leave them rolling in the aisles. The more you practice doing this, the better you'll get at coming up with funny puns and other spontaneous verbal humor.

[Adapted in part from Health, Healing and the Amuse System: Humor as Survival Training. To order: 800-228-0810.]

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