ABSTRACT
As psychiatrist Lenore Terr writes in her new book, Beyond Love and Work, "Adult play is picking up interest and therapeutic usefulness". Play is turning out to be "a great nonmedicinal tranquilizer". Terry Braverman, a comedian and corporate consultant, advised one CEO to use a ventriloquist's dummy whenever he had to present bad news to his board. The corporate world is now swarming with humor advisors who have evolved their own technical terms, including "eustress" (good stress), "psychoneuroimmunology", "humor quotients", and the peril of TS. Like all burgeoning fields, the humor biz has evolved a number of statistics. Robert Provine, a psychologist and neurobiologist at the University of Maryland, reports that speakers who are trying to be funny laugh 46 percent more than the people they are addressing, and people laugh 30 times more often when they are in a group than when they are alone.
