COMMUNICATION Humor and Communication A little bit of humor can help just about any type of communication. From adding stories to a presentation to sprinkling in a random question in a survey, humor can help keep your audience engaged and listening. For the purposes of this book, we’re going to apply humor to the most common methods of business communication, as defined below: • Conversation – Communicating an idea through dialogue, in– person, on the phone, or over Instant Messaging. • Email – Using electronic mail to inform or influence an individual 1 or group of people. • Presentations – Attempting to inform or influence using speech, live or virtually, often with the aid of software such as PowerPoint. • Training – Teaching an idea or set of ideas, through a live or pre–recorded setting, with the goal of educating the audience and building a specific set of skills. • Documents – Using written documents and spreadsheets to inform, influence, or educate. With these contexts in mind, here are 100 ways to use humor to improve communication. 1 Or to Reply-All to a message that by no means needs everyone to be copied on. 14