A little humor can be the spoon full of sugar to help a health topic go down easier for your wellness program audience. Consider adding funny elements to your wellness newsletter, calendar, posters, and other health communications.
Humor in health communications can:
- Get readers’ attentions
- Increase interest in topics
- Ease anxiety
- Emphasize key points or messages
- Distract people from thinking about counter arguments
- Make messages more memorable
You don’t need to be Jay Leno to be effective in using humor to get your point across. Easy ways to add in humor include using:
- Anecdotes – short accounts of something that happened conveyed in amusing ways. (i.e., Patient: “Doctor, I keep seeing little black spots before my eyes.” Doctor: “Have you seen a Doctor before?” Patient: “No, just little black spots.”)
- Analogies – comparing two things that are similar in some way to help explain something or make it easier to understand, often using the word “like” (i.e., Are you maturing like a fine wine, or fermenting like a rotten grape? )
- Quotes – from well-known individuals who have made interesting observations about a topic (i.e., “The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” – Lucille Ball)
To prevent blunders, don’t:
- Try too hard.
- Use offensive humor – ethnic, racist, sexist or off-color humor.
- Overdo it – humor is not the main goal, it’s a means to an end.
How do you lighten up your communications? Share your ideas on our Facebook page!
