You have two minutes to craft a story about laughter.
Originally written on 10 June 2016, and finished much later!
Yesterday afternoon, 15 of us crowded into a conference room designed to accommodate 10. Kishore Hari, the loud and animated director of the Bay Area Science Festival, told us that we were going to tell each other personal stories. “Are you all on board with that?” Well, sure, I guess, even though none of us had never met each other before.
Kishore handed the first volunteer a card, and she flipped it over. It read, “My Crazy Family.” The volunteer now had two minutes to improvise a story on that topic. So, the first thing I learned about this person I’d just met was that her family loves playing pranks on each other, that her father is a hunter, and that for a while a running prank in her family was to hide a dismembered turkey’s foot in someone’s pillow or shoe. This led to an awkward moment during a sleepover in 7th grade, when a visiting friend found the turkey foot in her bedsheets and didn’t find it funny at all.
Another volunteer, C, got the card “car.” So, the first thing I ever learned about C was that when she was 15, nearing the end of her Driver’s Ed course and feeling a little overconfident, she took the family SUV on a 5-minute errand and got it crushed in a gate.
This is part of the Communicating Science Conference (ComSciCon), a national workshop for graduate students in science fields who want to become better communicators and help make science more accessible to the public. The event is a mixture of panels with experts representing fields from government policy and law to journalism and K12 education. After the panel on Communicating through Creative Outlets and Storytelling, we split off to get some hands-on practice.
My partner was K, and the card I flipped over read, “laughter.” The result was that the first thing I ever said to K was “Hi, I’m Anna,” and the second thing was “I’m going to tell you about the time I laughed the hardest.” I told K about an incident from my 9th grade Comparative Cultures class. Our teacher was very intimidating, and we used to have to give in-class presentations while she sat at the front of the room and stared at us over the rims of her glasses. One time, my classmate got a long serrated wooden stick stuck in his afro at the beginning of his presentation, and our teacher had to pull out scissors from her desk to cut it out.
In return, K told me that she and a friend once listened to the same Jack Johnson song 46 times, over two hours, without realizing that it was the same song, while remarking to each other that all Jack Johnson songs sound the same.
After telling our stories once, we gave each other feedback by answering three questions. What words do you remember? Jack Johnson, friend, iTunes, same, “46 times.” What emotions did you feel during the story? Surprise, familiarity (I also think that all Jack Johnson songs sound the same), silliness. What questions were you left with? When did this happen? Do you still listen to Jack Johnson? Do you even like Jack Johnson? And which song was this? I was surprised by the words K remembered from my story; my enthusiasm for certain details somehow didn’t serve to emphasize them, and some of what K noticed most were things I hadn’t noticed I’d said.
With that in mind, we told our stories again. And again. And then performed them for the rest of the group.
I don’t remember where my fellow ComSciCon attendees are from, what they study, or how many siblings they have -- usual questions from a gathering of graduate students. But I still have a strong sense of their personalities, their sense of humor, their families, and their friends, not only from the choice of content of their stories, but of the way they delivered them.
The session was short and too few stories were told. I found myself wanting to carry the cards around with me (other cards in the deck included “unsupervised children” and “a time I felt embarrassed”) to use the next time I meet someone. I think it’s nice to start with a story! And I think it’s nice that the first thing K and I did together was make each other laugh.
