By Brian Boyko

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of an academic paper not yet published, doing a comparative content analysis of the "Daily Show" and the network nightly news broadcasts. Not surprisingly, the "Daily Show" actually conveyed a similar amount of substantive material - that is, information without jokes - as the network news broadcasts.

But in that paper, written by Prof. Julia R. Fox, Glory Koloen, and Volkan Sahin at Indiana University-Bloomington, there was a passage that caught my attention.

"Although the two sources were found here to be equally substantive, are they equally informative? There is debate among scholars as to how well soft news shows, in which The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is categorized by some (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006), can inform their viewers…. the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election survey found younger viewers of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart answered more political questions correctly than respondents who did not watch that show ("Stewart's 'stoned slackers,'" 2004).

Experimental research may well substantiate this corelational survey data suggestion that viewers may actually process and remember substantive information presented on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart better than when it is presented on more serious sources of political information. When viewers see positive messages that are appetitively activated (in an approach mode towards the message) and tend to encode more information than when they are aversively activated while viewing a negative message (Fox, Park, & Lang, 2006; Lang, 2006a; Lang, 2006b; Lang, Sparks, Bradley, Lee, & Wang, 2004). Previous studies have found that political coverage is often negative… In contrast, although The Daily Show with Jon Stewart may also be negative in tone, the appetitive system is likely to be activated by the humor on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and by the audience's laughter, which may elicit emotional contagion (McDonald & Fredin, 2001).

Or, to sum up without the Ph.D. language: "Maybe the fact that Stewart is funny causes people to remember the important stuff more."

I too had read the "Stoned Slackers" article from CNN, and thought at the time that it was not particularly surprising that the Daily Show viewers were likely to know more about the election, thinking something along the lines that the Daily Show just attracted smart viewers - Stewart doesn't exactly do sophomoric humor on his show. But now I'm not so sure.

Certainly, the professors and teachers that I remember the most from are those teachers who used humor on a day to day basis to get their points across. Walter Lewin, professor of Physics at MIT embodies this idea - his class lectures have made it to YouTube, where he tells a student, quite matter of factly, that "So what I'm going to do now, Simon, I'm going to beat you with cat fur." Not that Prof. Lewin's classes are all laugh-riots, but I think the students paid attention and retained more of that information for that experiment than if he had just read from the text book.

Of course, especially in the technical fields, it's incredibly important to be able to learn new skills and tackle new problems. Today's darling language is tomorrow's obsolescence - COBOL comes to mind, although C++ programmers now find that they're migrating to AJAX and RUBY in order to produce the Web apps that are now in demand, rather than the console apps that were once king.

So why are technical demonstrations and technical skill-imparting meetings are often so painfully dull? If you want to impart information to be retained, it's usually best to add a bit of humor to the information. Even we've been doing this for a while at Network Performance Daily - making jokes in the Tuesday and Thursday link posts, adding humor where possible and appropriate. (Heck, I was even hired in part because I do have some professional comedy training.)

Certainly, many technical people aren't known for their comedy, and the only thing less funny than zero-humor content is humor content from people who aren't actually funny. But if someone in the IT department has this talent, it should be encouraged, not repressed due to a stifling corporate culture. Investors and clients will know you're serious from the job you do - and you can do a better job if you retain more relevant information.