Laughter as Relief

Over the summer, two of my oldest friends and I all got marketing internships for Sport Clips. We all had an “in” with the regional developer and easily got positions. And this was a pretty unusual internship because we were paid. Not just hourly either; on top of that we were compensated for driving. That’s pretty much unheard of for an internship.

I must say we earned every penny of our paychecks. Every week we were assigned four stores in the area to market. And by market I mean handing out coupons. Eight thousand per store to be exact. We would scour the shopping centers and strip malls surrounding each store, giving each business coupons for their employees and customers. It may sound easy but it can be extremely frustrating and tiring. Especially in the hundred degree heat. Thanks Texas.

Driving around North Texas with my friends for an entire summer, armed with coupons and deprived of air conditioning and water, does something to a person. Emotions run high whenever it reaches four o’clock and you still have over three thousand coupons to give out and there are no more stores in sight. I mean my friends and I were strange to begin with (which probably doesn’t help when you’re trying to encourage total strangers to come get their haircut at Sport Clips) but by the end of each day, we would reach a whole new level of eccentricity.

One extremely warm day in June, we happened to find ourselves in Fort Worth marketing the Sport Clips on University Drive. By then we had already marketed around ten stores, so this whole ordeal was getting a little old. It was also our second day for the store because we could not finish for the life of us the day before. Procrastination kicked in and instead of starting immediately upon arrival we decided to sit in the car and watch YouTube videos, obviously much more appealing than walking around in the hot sun.

I parked my car outside a Great Outdoors and Meagan pulled up one of the weirdest videos I have ever watched. It was actually from the Sunny Heights High series that was brought up during the Australian humor presentation. In this particular video, the oddball theatre teacher proceeds to perform an interpretive dance for his students. Literally, this dance goes on for at least five minutes. My friends and I erupted into a giant fit of laughter. I’m sure that if anyone walked by they would have been extremely concerned for our well-being. It took us a good ten minutes to calm down and pull ourselves together.

However, once we entered the Great Outdoors in order to give them coupons, our laughter returned. Somehow we successfully (well relatively successful) gave away some coupons, which were most likely never used because we laughed during the entire exchange. Once we got out of that restaurant, the laughter continued for who knows how much longer, prompting us to take a very extended lunch break after only working for about 10 minutes.

Now that I’ve been introduced to the theories related to humor, I see now that our fit of laughter was probably related to the Relief Theory. Frustration, exhaustion, and overheating caused us to build up stress, only to be relieved by ridiculous bouts of laughter. It probably did help in our marketing abilities but it definitely helped us keep our sanity.