Name: How to Find Laughter Anywhere | Chris Duffy | TED
Uploaded: 2026-02-27T08:11:32.000Z
Duration: 7 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

My favorite part about working in an elementary school is that I could never predict what was going to happen next.

Sometimes you think that you're handing out a worksheet, just reviewing the names of shapes, but

then instead of getting back hexagon and octagon, you get back this.

And I think we can agree that is just correct.

Or another time I was teaching a class on human biology to my fifth grade students when one of them afterwards handed in this anonymous question card.

And you know what really gets me about this?

What kills me is we had spent so long studying punctuation situation and he still used a period instead of a question mark.

At the same time that I was teaching elementary school students, I was also teaching adults improv comedy at a local theater on the weekends.

This was a group of retired folks, graduate students, and

semi successful business people who were paying money to spend their Saturday mornings in an unventilated basement with me.

And most of the exercises that we were doing together were to get them to let go of the self critical part of their brain, to release the idea that there was a right answer, to find, and

to instead be more comfortable with their honest, creative, idiosyncratic thoughts.

Now any elementary school teacher can tell you that getting kids to share their honest, unexpected thoughts, that's not something you have to cultivate.

They will do that whether you want them to or not.

I mean, here are some real questions that kids asked me out of the blue with no context during what was supposed to be a silent work time.

Is it possible to make myself live longer so that I can see the sun explode?

Are pigs actually prejudiced against women or is that just an expression?

If your brother isn't married yet, why doesn't he just marry your mom?

And actually that brings up a really important point, which is that kids ideas are not always good, sometimes they're very bad.

I'm personally very grateful that my mom and my brother are not married.

You know, there's some research that suggests that for many of us, fifth grade is close to the peak of this kind of wildly free, uninhibited creative thinking.

In my experience, the difference between people with an amazing sense of humor and those without is often just whether they are willing to accept and notice their honest reactions or whether they try their hardest to fit them into a box.

I saw that shift with my adult improv students.

At first, when we would do an exercise where they were asked to name seven things in a given category as quickly and creatively as possible, many of them would get stuck.

One guy, Rick, a corporate tax lawyer, answered the prompt seven weird types of shoes by saying, brown shoes, white shoes, black shoes, gray shoes.

But then, after we practiced celebrating our more bizarre thoughts instead of repressing them, Rick eventually came up with a list that included things like shoes covered in mud, shoes covered in gold, shoes covered in the blood of my enemies.

But it's also definitely more interesting.

And I think that's the point when we turn off our self judgment and we just notice the things that stand out to us or that we think we can surprise ourselves in ways that are hilarious and delightful.

Every comedian that I know has a notebook or some sort of document where they keep track of all the little odd things that they notice or think throughout the day.

And what you find when you start keeping track is that there is no shortage of material out there.

And if you have a little bit of courage to allow yourself to be laughed at and to laugh at yourself, you can make discoveries that you never would have otherwise, right?

If you want to know what balls are for, sometimes you gotta ask.

I have found that you can find laughter in even the driest places if you bring some of that mischievous fifth grade energy to the instructions and to what you're supposed to be doing right.

It can be an opportunity for you to hang out with your good friend Gabriela.

Now, I have had the most fun when I applied these lessons that I got from my 5th graders to self serious adult spaces, to places where I maybe feel intimidated or like I don't necessarily belong.

So for example, for me personally, LinkedIn, terrifying.

I've never been comfortable with business networking.

But I've also always been kind of fascinated by LinkedIn.

Like they let you make a profile and they don't verify that you work at the place you say you work.

So I decided I was going to test this out and have some fun.

I made a profile on LinkedIn where I said that I was the CEO of LinkedIn and I didn't think they would even let me do that.

After I made the profile, one of the most incredible things that has ever happened in my entire life happened, which is that LinkedIn sent this email to everyone in my contact list.

They sent that email, congratulate Chris on the new job.

That's a better joke than anything I could ever write in my entire life.

I was the CEO of LinkedIn on LinkedIn for one year.

And at that one year, Mark, LinkedIn sent yet another email to everyone in my contact list asking them to congratulate me on my work anniversary.

And at that point, I received a message from a woman named Faith who worked on LinkedIn's Trust and Security team.

She said my account was being locked due to concerns about its inaccuracy.

So I sent her back a photo of my license front and back to prove that my name was, in fact, Chris Duffy.

Faith responded, the thing that we are concerned about is not that your name is not Chris Duffy.

It's that you are claiming to be the CEO of LinkedIn.

So I responded, faith, you are taking a pretty disrespectful tone for someone who works for me.

Ten seconds later, she permanently deactivated my account.

It was a short but glorious stint running my own personal social network.

I'm more than just a fifth grade graduate.