Humorous communications

Humor is an important ingredient in effective communication. Humor can ease the situation. It enables the communicator to subtly point out some shortcomings or something which if told otherwise would hurt the receiver. Great people had very good sense of humor. Once one such saintly person was approached by a person who claimed himself to be a scholar who can speak on any religious subject with ease. So the saint gave him an opportunity to render discourses on The Bhagavath Gita for a period of one week at a religious place where people gathered to appreciate religious values. On the first day, 50 persons attended the discourse, on the second 25, on the third day it dwindled to 10 persons. So the person became very furious. He approached the saint and told him “ The people here do not have religious sentiments, they do not appreciate good things being told to them, see only ten people came to attend the discourse”. To this the saint replied with a smile, “ Please be patient, at least there were ten people. When Lord Krishna recited the Gita, there was only one person” ( i.e. Arjuna).


There was a foreign delegate who was supposed to address a group of people in the host country. As the foreigner did not know the local language, he was supposed to speak in his mother tongue while a translator will translate his speech. The speech commenced and the translator kept translating the speech. At one point, the foreigner went on narrating a humorous incident for about five minutes. As he used some local slangs the translator could not aptly understand. However, his duty was to translate. So he just told the entire joke in a single sentence. The people immediately burst into a roaring laughter. At this the foreigner became inquisitive. The narration which lasted for five minutes could be translated in a single sentence and got the desired result. How did it happen? When he enquired the translator, he simply quipped, Actually I could not translate your joke, nevertheless, I did not want to disappoint you. So I told the audience, “the delegate has just narrated a joke, please laugh”