Today's Marketing Cookie - Make Them Laugh

Today's fortune came from JaeMi Pennington of Burlington, MA. JaeMi is a public relations professional at the Davies Murphy Group and has a decade of public relations experience. When not serving clients, JaeMi enjoys tennis, golf and drinking scotch. He was an avid Red Sox fan until the 2012 season, when they broke his heart, yet again. Follow him on Twitter: @JaeMiPennington

Today's Marketing Cookie is about the power of humor.

People love to laugh. The most popular tweet I have ever sent was of a joke, "Has Sarah Palin ever been para-sailin'?" That one tweet received thousands of retweets, unlike anything I have sent on Twitter before or since. Companies capitalize on the power of humor too. In fact, the most loved commercials during the Superbowl are often also the funniest. The same is true for the shows people watch. The top ten most watched television show finales have all been comedies:

1. M*A*S*H
2. Cheers
3. Seinfeld
4. Friends
5. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
6. The Cosby Show
7. All in the Family
8. Family Ties
9. Home Improvement
10. Frasier

I learned at a very young age about the power of telling a few funny jokes.  Although it was a traumatic experience, I think this moment in my childhood has something to do with the genesis of my personality.

When I was about six years old, my family was invited to share Thanksgiving Day with some close college friends of my parents. They had two boys in their late teens and early twenties who were the about same ages as my older brothers. They also had a teenage daughter who doted over my baby sister. I, on the other hand, was decidedly the odd man out. There's wasn't anyone in that entire house interested in spending a little time with a hyperactive, annoying little six year old boy.

After we finished the turkey dinner, all the guys announced that they were going outside to rev the engines on their cool muscle cars. My mother stopped them and said, "Why don't you take Myles with you?" This is something that had been suggested millions of times by my mother, but repeatedly and strenuously petitioned by my brothers. This time however, they complied saying, "Okay Slime, (That's what they called me.) common outside with us."

I was thrilled!

Once we got outside, it didn't very long before I had asked too many questions and completely annoyed them. They knew I was afraid of the dog, so, threatened to feed me to him if I didn't stop annoying them. Well, I didn't stop. Annoyance was really all I knew how to do. So, once they had endured enough, they wrangled me to the dirt, bound my hands and ankles with duck tape, and fit me into a cardboard box.  Next, they dragged me near the dog house, who began barking and scratching at the box.

I was terrified!

I don't know where the idea came from, but rather than crying or screaming for my mother, I began telling little jokes. I told a few knock knock jokes, and delivered a few one liners from inside the box saying, "Hey who turned out the lights?!" and, "Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?" or, "Where's the Beef?". Then something remarkable happened... I could hear the guys laughing and telling my brothers to let me out of the box.

I learned that having a sense of humor could get me out of all sorts of trouble and my life was never quite the same after that day. I made my brothers laugh, which gave me immense super powers over them. The better I got at getting them to chuckle, the more they wanted me around and the happier my life became. While today's fortune says, "Humor is the best weapon against sarcasm. Laugh at it." I would suggest that humor is the best weapon against almost anything, and it may even let your personality out of the box!