The Right Body Language for Humor Tonality

The Right Body Language for Humor

Tonality

You’ve probably heard of the so-called "55%, 38%, 7% rule" which
states that 55% of the meaning of communication is body language,
38% is in tonality, and 7% rests in the words themselves.
Is it really what you thought it to be?
Here's the part you may not know…
Professor Albert Mehrabian, Ph.D., of the University of California, Los
Angles (UCLA), is credited as the originator of the "55%, 38%, 7%
Rule".
He and his colleagues conducted studies on communication patterns
and published them in professional journals in 1967.
In their study, subjects listened to nine recorded words, three meant
to convey liking ("honey", "dear" and "thanks"), three to convey
neutrality ("maybe", "really" and "oh") and three to convey disliking
("don't", "brute" and "terrible"). The words were spoken with varying
tonalities and subjects were asked to guess the emotions behind the
spoken words.
The finding was simply that tone carried more meaning than the
individual words themselves. But Mehrabian combined the statistical
results of both studies and came up with...You guessed it — the "55%, 38%, 7% Rule".
And I bet you had a gross misunderstanding of this "rule".
The reason I'm telling you all those is that I want you to look at "The
Humor Tonality" in proper perspective.
I wish we could assign a specific number to how we make women
laugh, but we can't. Your tonality might account for as much as 60%
of the overall effect of your speech, or it might only account for 15%
in certain situations.
What I can tell you is that your tonality often determines whether
you're funny or not. Have you noticed that some guys are "good at
telling jokes"? But have you ever paid attention to their voice quality
when they made everyone laugh?
Your tonality has to be upbeat and suggest funniness if you want to be
good at making women laugh.
Think for a moment how a funny talk show host would speak to
women. How about a professional stand-up comedian? A movie star? A
priest? A politician? You can play different roles when talking to
women. And that can be very funny.
Vary your volume, pitch, speech rate, etc. to match the conversation
topic, mood, and surroundings. Control your breathing rate so you
appear casual and assured. If you find it hard to control your speech,
use your gestures as pacers.
For example, you can speed up or slow down your hand movements to
help varying your tonality to convey a wider range of moods and
meanings. More often than not, the tonality (as well as body language)
in which you say something funny has more impact on the listener
than the actual content.