From a comedian and host of a hit TED podcast, a hilarious and enlightening guide to laughing your way into a fuller life Fourteen years ago, when Chris Duffy was an exhausted fifth-grade teacher, he taught the funniest person he’s ever met: eleven-year-old Gary. Gary was the school newspaper’s official food critic, blasting cafeteria pizza for looking like cardboard and opining that the baked beans weren’t “beany” enough. These days, Duffy is a stand-up comedian and the host of a podcast with millions of listeners, but he’s never forgotten the joy of laughing with Gary during a bleak Boston winter. Gary taught him that life without a sense of humor isn’t much of a life at all. But Duffy employs his trademark curiosity and wit to learn how a good laugh can bring us all closer to the good life. <Humor Me< is packed with strategies for a life filled with laughter, deep friendship, and meaning, and is a genuinely funny read along the way. Much like a dish of cafeteria beans, this book is an experience you’ll be thinking about for years afterward.

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CHRIS DUFFY is a stand-up comedian who has worked as a television writer (Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas on HBO, National Geographic Explorer) and is currently host of TED’s hit podcast How to Be a Better Human, winner of the 2025 Webby Award for Advice & How-To Podcasts. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC News, and NPR.

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**From a comedian and host of hit TED podcast, How to Be a Better Human, a hilarious and enlightening guide to laughing your way into a fuller life

“Warning: this book may cause repeated smiling. It’s a delightful read about how we can bring more levity into our lives.” —Adam Grant, author of Hidden Potential and Think Again**

In his days as an exhausted fifth grade teacher, Chris Duffy taught the funniest person he’s ever met: eleven-year-old Gary. Gary was the school newspaper’s official food critic, blasting cafeteria pizza for looking like cardboard and opining that the baked beans weren’t “beany” enough. These days, Duffy is a professional comedy writer and the host of a podcast with millions of listeners, but he’s never forgotten the transformative joy of laughing with Gary during a bleak Boston winter. In Humor Me, he shares a road map for how to cultivate and strengthen a sense of humor in a challenging world.

Duffy embarks on a journey that takes him from comedy clubs to emergency rooms to a helicopter full of Navy SEALs and back to his own keyboard to reveal how—and why—a good laugh can bring us closer to the good life. Drawing on personal stories, insights from the social sciences, and the wisdom of comedians, Duffy offers practical strategies, including:

• How to hone the art of noticing, finding humor in the most unlikely places
• Why you should take social risks (to build connection through humor!)
• How to apply the comedy secret that laughs come in threes.
  Humor Me promises to deepen your friendships, enhance your creativity, and lighten life’s burdens, and is a genuinely funny read along the way.

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The First Pillar: Being Present

Noticing That the World Is Filled with Absurdity

Your Brain Is the Background Blur on a Zoom Call

The first step to laughing more is noticing more. As far as I know, no one has mastered the art of laughing at things they have not yet noticed. The good news is that the world is filled with absurdity and weirdness—we’ve just accepted it as “normal.” And as a result, every day is chock-full of opportunities to tickle your sense of humor.

This morning, I saw a man wearing a transparent backpack with a cat inside and pushing a small dog in a stroller. I guess that technically this man was taking his pets on a walk, but he was the only one walking. Both animals looked distinctly bored, while this poor guy was sweating profusely. I could swear that the cat and I shared a moment when we caught each other’s eyes and both of us were thinking, What is this guy accomplishing here?

Noticing small moments and details brings more spontaneous laughter into your life and reveals the world around you to be a more magical, hilarious place. That works only if you’re fully present. Our natural inclination, unfortunately, is to glance past the world without really seeing it.

As a result, a lot of the weird, delightful parts of the world, the opportunities for humor and laughter that surround you, fade into a nondescript blur like one of your coworkers’ Zoom backgrounds (the one definitely hiding his many shelves of Lego spaceships from his coworkers). But we can train our attention and focus to bring the blur back into sharp definition. It’s a skill that you can practice and that can pay big rewards.

We’ve all had moments of crystal-clear awareness and attention. Two experiences we’ve all shared, and during which I bet you’ve noticed your surroundings with real specificity, are your first night in a new home and any time you use someone else’s bathroom.

When you first move to a new house or apartment, you’re attuned to the details. You notice the sounds of the pipes, the creaky spot on the floor, the way one corner seems to have been patched up in a slightly different shade of white paint.

But then, a few days in, that stuff fades out of your attention. That’s just how things are. After moving into a new place, I have a two-week period when I can put art or decorations on a given wall. If I go past that time frame, in my mind it becomes The Blank Wall. I can’t hang up a picture over there, that’s The Blank Wall! That’s just how that wall is. It would look weird to put photos up there.

Alternatively, imagine you’re at a friend’s house, and you’ve asked to use their bathroom. It’s always easier to notice strange, unusual details when you’re outside your own home. When you walk into someone else’s bathroom, you immediately see all the ways they’ve set up that space differently than you. How do they put the toilet paper on the roll? Do they do it correctly (with the paper coming down over the top) or like a degenerate (hanging down loose and wild in the back like some kind of paper mullet)? Do they have a little squatty potty stool? A bidet? Or do they have an old-school, thick plastic cushion on top of the toilet seat as though it’s intended for you to sit comfortably while you wait for a bus? Is there a pile of books and magazines? Are they disturbingly crinkled as though they’ve gotten wet and then air-dried?

This is the kind of stuff you see in someone else’s place but fail to notice in your own. It stands out! It’s weird to you! And it is exactly these kinds of observations that let humor in. That’s the attention and mental frame that creates a fertile soil for laughter to sprout. Humor almost always springs out of noticing what’s off, odd, strange, or delightful—when you pay close attention.

All of which brings me to the first pillar of cultivating a humor mindset: being present. If we’re going to benefit from the joy, creativity, and insight that humor can bring, our goal should be to maintain, as often as possible, this new-bathroom frame of mind.

The Secret Code of Laughter

We’ll get into how to preserve that mindset soon. But first let’s get deeper into what makes something funny when we are present and observing it. Why do we laugh? What does it mean for something to be funny?

Greg Bryant is a cognitive psychologist at UCLA who studies humor and laughter from an evolutionary perspective. There are a number of competing academic theo…