I’m going to start with a poop. That is a cartoon poo. Someone asked me yesterday if it was an ice cream, which made me a little sad. I wanted to start by saying that there’s something about the poop joke that is universally funny. It crosses lines of age, gender, nationality. Seven-year-olds in India find it as hilarious as my seven-year-old in Washington, D.C. The poop joke is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the last three years and thinking about how the poop joke can be an agent for social change. So a poop joke is where this journey begins. A couple years ago, I found myself in a comedy club in Mumbai, India. For those of you who are wondering, a comedy club for stand-up comedy in Mumbai, India is a pretty great place to watch some pretty raw, aggressive comedy because comedy is not censored there as it is on a lot of television. It’s a brand new comedy scene, so a lot of amazing things are happening. A popular comic named Tanmay Bhatt gets up and he tells a poop joke. And here’s how it goes. I hope you can hear it. What makes a shitty, shitty, smelling city? That’s because 54% of all Indians shit outside. You guys know this 54% man. And this number’s been going up since 1947. Did you guys know in the 40s it was 34% and then the 50s is 44%? This number’s been going up. Basically the British left and we started shitting outside the long term. I think this is the best defense strategy any country can adopt. Like make the country smell so shitty that no one will want to invade us again. So let me back up a little further. So I knew that joke was coming. And the reason I knew is because I had done all the research and pre-production that got me and our documentary crew there that night to Mumbai, India. So two things happened when he told that joke that were surprising to me even though I knew it was coming. The first thing was that I felt that I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to laugh. And I think it’s because I knew what was behind the joke. And the second thing that happened, which is more important to this story, is that the Indian audience thought it was hilarious. They really laughed hard. And so I knew that behind this joke is a really painful truth in India. So in India, 1600 girls, 1600 children die every day because of sanitation related illnesses and lack of access to clean water. It is a giant ripple effect of a poop problem, toilets. And even when they survive, one in four girls actually drops out of school because they have no place to take care of their bodily functions. So this is in India, millions of girls whose futures are stopped before they even began like this gorgeous girl who I hung out with in Mumbai during our shoot. And beyond that, 30% of girls are sexually harassed and raped when they try to access public toilets. And so that is all behind a poop joke. And so here’s why that story matters and why it propelled me to something else. It is a lot like a quote that was given years ago from my great mentor actually, and one of the forefathers of comedy and social change, Norman Lear. And the point was, while I was worrying about whether it was appropriate for me to laugh and being very concerned that I knew what was behind the joke, the Indian audience thought it was hilarious. Now the Indian audience knows and feels much more about that scenario than I ever could. So there was connection in that joke and there was catharsis and there was pain and truth. And that was the opening gateway with comedy. And so I want to tell you what happened with Stand Up Planet and how it led me to something else. So what happened with Stand Up Planet is that we followed the documentary about stand up comics in the developing world and they followed their jokes into the deep social issues of their day and we went to India and South Africa. And so we premiered it on two television networks, one in India, one in South Africa, I’m sorry, I wish it was in South Africa, we tried, one in India, one in the United States. And then the reason that we made the movie, it’s worth mentioning, is that I had produced with a group about four or five, I’ve lost count, short documentary specials about global development and global poverty and they were very earnest storytelling examples. And so we actually wanted to see if we could find a new way to engage people around global development, global poverty, because there is some evidence for the fact that when we are othering people with our well-intentioned stories that actually we’re invoking pity and when you invoke pity, you check people right out of the problem. And so we needed to learn what we had done with Stand Up Planet and so I directed a large experimental design study where we compared the comedy with a more serious traditional storytelling mechanism and we found some pretty amazing stuff. Very long story short, we found that the comedy was uniquely persuasive in getting people to care about global poverty to see themselves as agents of change and in a little bit of audience segmentation, we learned that the people who were most apathetic about global poverty in the first place were the most convinced that they should be doing something about it. So it was really exciting. And so for me, that just created more questions that I wanted to answer and I sat back and said, you know, we have to expand this work. What can we know about how social change, I’m sorry, about how comedy can be harnessed to actually marshal resources for some of the most urgent social challenges of our day? What can we know about comedy across disciplines, neuroscience, political science, communication, media effects, psychology, sociology, all these disciplines that have looked about at humor? What can we know about how social change actually works? And what can we know about when not to use it? Really important. And ultimately, what can we know and how can we put into practice what we know? So that led me to launch a new project called the laughter effect with the Gates Foundation and over the next several months, we’ll be releasing several reports and quantitative and qualitative research to examine exactly this question and to try to answer it in a practical way. And so as part of it, I’ve developed this typology for comedy and social change and none of this should feel very mysterious to you all because you are entertainment consumers. But it turns out there are four real formats of comedy that deal with social issues in some way. And of course, these are the dominant entertainment comedy formats that we experience as consumers, so it makes sense. But why now? So beyond knowing, even really deeply, something that comics have known for a really long time, by the way, Liz Winston, that comedy can fuel social change and make us think differently, there’s something about the timing of here and now that may be expanding comedy’s influence even more than we thought was possible. There’s something about a level of digital era trends and access and talent. It’s actually exploding around the world. And so I had to start with that. So as one of many trends, the Daily Show, which we now know has actually involved a whole generation of young people in understanding political and civic issues and learning more about their world, but it’s not just that. The Daily Show’s format has been picked up and mimicked precisely around the world in countries where it really matters and in the US. So of course, we all know about John Oliver’s incredible show. I share his stuff every week. There’s a show in India called The Week That Wasn’t, exactly the same format. A show in South Africa called Late Night News with Loisa Gola, who’s a stand-up comedian and it’s worth mentioning here that this is the first time in South Africa after apartheid that there has been a black man on television consistently criticizing the government and the political condition. This is pretty dramatic stuff. In Egypt, a man named Bassem Youssef created something called Albert Amag. I’ll tell you more about that in a second. And he’s called the John Stuart of Egypt. And of course, I could not possibly talk about this without talking about incredible Samantha Bee’s, just brilliant. And where that format goes, influence follows. Really important to keep that in mind. This is not incidental. This is millions of people who are paying attention to this. As another trend, digital native networks are bringing us new characters and social issues that frankly, legacy networks were not going to bring us for a long time since Norman Lear shows, to be honest. So places like Amazon and Netflix are bringing us shows like Transparent and Master of None, who watches that one. So great. And it’s important to recognize that not only is this happening in the new digital native networks that have become the real power players in the industry, but the fact that there’s a ripple effect now on the legacy comedy shows who have to compete with more and more dramatic storylines of their own. If anybody watched Blackish this week, you know what I’m saying. Also an amazing trend, and this is really exciting globally in the US and globally, but I get very excited about the international examples. Digital native sketch and stand-up comedy that’s enabled by YouTube is exploding around the world. And so of course we know, and by the way, important to mention that the reason that is relevant is because they are overtly taking on social issues. In international examples, they are uncensored, which is a really big deal if you live in areas where you have state-controlled media systems. So Funny or Die, as we all know, is influencing all kinds of issues. I’m sure we’ve all shared Funny or Die videos, but you may not know that Funny or Die actually just opened a Washington, D.C. office. It’s run by a former White House staffer. They’re involved in State Department Public Diplomacy, also an HBO series. So lots of influence there. Between two ferns, I hope this is every social change strategist’s favorite example. You know, this clip really holds up. It cracks me up every time. When President Obama needed young people to sign up for health insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act, he turned to between two ferns and guess what happened? Young people signed up well beyond their expected amounts and traffic to the website went way up. In places like Gaza and Saudi Arabia, YouTube-enabled stand-up comedy is taking on violence, inequality, gender issues. These are issues that are not being dealt with on regular television, and they’re creating real competition in the space. So tons of influence. And of course, authentic truth tellers. We talked about authenticity earlier today, and there’s actually some great research on that as it applies to comedy. But in an era in which one in five Americans still trust public officials, that seems very sad to me, and one in 30 people find corporate leaders to be honest brokers, honestly, we seem to be turning to comedians to be our folks, right? And so, you know, John Stewart has been referenced several times in studies about influential journalists, and of course we know he’s not a journalist. John Oliver is influencing media and public policy on issues as wonky as net neutrality. I mean, who thought that could become a human issue? Basim Yusef, whose comedy in Egypt was seen as so outrageous and such an affront to the government that he was exiled. He was actually here in the United States. I think there’s going to be a documentary about him. And of course, Amy Schumer won the Peabody Award last year, and I should add Amy Schumer is a poop joke teller. She has a lot of other things too, so I’m just going to keep bringing it back to poop to make sure you don’t forget. So clearly we have a sense then that comedy matters, and there’s something about this moment. And we know more about how comedy actually works when we’re talking about social change and we’re talking about awareness and attitudes, possibly actions, putting a little asterisk on that. So I wanted to talk about three influence highlights that I’ve come across already, and there are many, many more in a massive report, so I apologize. I really identified with you when you said it took you an hour and a half to talk about your studies. Oh my God, it’s the story of my life. So comedy’s persuasive muscle is specific. So it’s pretty well documented. This was not a hard image to find, by the way. So we know, particularly in a room like this, that comedy, that we are persuaded through two routes. One is through a central route where we process the messages, and the other is through a route where we think about emotions and affect and how much we like the speaker. And so this matters in comedy because comedy is processed through that heuristic route, so through emotions and liking, and that should feel really intuitive to all of us. And so two points to keep in mind. There are some evidence that comedy may have a sleeper effect, that it may actually sit with us a little bit longer and over time becomes memorable, even if we discount the message as a joke. So that’s really important for strategists to keep in mind. The second and really, really important, when the comedy is only mildly funny, meaning it’s cooked up by a group of strategists, and I put myself right in that, when it’s cooked up by a bunch of strategists, not very funny, it’s not professionally funny, it doesn’t work. It’s actually, it’s might be worse. So that’s, yeah, yeah, it can be worse. Thank you. This is worse. So two super quick examples from my own career that now I understand because now I look at the research, but one really quickly is when I tried to use sketch comedy for a youth civic engagement project, and the only funny thing about it was a guy in a banana suit, and that’s not funny. So that’s all you need to know about that. And the second was a good example. We worked with Sarah Silverman, when I was working for Norman Lear. We worked with Sarah Silverman and many other brilliant comics and had them come up with concepts for saying things like, in the time it takes me to wax my mustache, that was Sarah Silverman, you could register to vote. So that was wildly successful because the professional funny people were in charge. The second key point here is that, okay, so I might, this might be throwing a little bit of a provocative idea into this crowd, but I’m going to go for it. So when we think about behavior change and we think about comedy, I think we might be doing a little reductionist thinking if we look to comedy to sort of make us do something right away. And I actually think there’s a lot of social change efforts that could bear a little bit of listening to this idea. So comedy is perhaps more useful than many other genres in encouraging us to learn, to share information and to normalize our feelings about other people and ideas. No, those are not insignificant in the journey for social change. We don’t need someone necessarily on that journey to do a thing right away. And in fact, if we reduce comedy to that idea, I think we’re going to miss the point. And so there are a couple of ideas that I wanted to talk about with you all. So I was super excited that Julia Frastino was here and that as a really quick prank moment, I did not know she was here. And can you see her citation in there? So I didn’t know she was here and this study was already in here. But in a frank tweet yesterday, I saw that she was there and I said, the Jay Frastino and Ma El authors of humor and social media and a risk campaign colon CDC zombie. I got very excited. So I’m not going to repeat what Julia said because you should read her actual study. But I wanted to make a slightly different point with it, which is the fact that the CDC is really happy with this campaign and they should be. They were not, you know, this is about sharing. And by the way, Ernest Storyteller, confessional moment here. I make lots of Ernest stories. If we’re continuing to only make Ernest stories about our deep troubling social issues, guess who we’re talking to ourselves. And so sometimes you have to find the thing that’s going to cut through the clutter and comedy does that. If you look at the example in scripted entertainment storytelling and these effects work slightly differently. If you look at Mitch and Cam, who are a very normal mundane couple, they happen to be a gay couple living with their daughter. If you look at Gallup public opinion polls about support for gay marriage from the time that this show premiered to 2014, you see a historic decline in opposition to this. Now this is not a magic bullet theory of media effects. I know there’s a lot of effects folks in the room. There were a lot of other things going on. But the point is normalizing people and ideas and offering a safe way in over time builds tolerance. It’s really hard to hate people when you really like them. So really important. And a couple of final points here. So comedy and particularly satire actually opens the door to complex social issues. And so what this actually means is that our barrier to entry to learning about complex social issues is actually reduced when we experience it first through comedy. And so what happens over time is that we pay closer attention to the news and information around those social issues because we’ve gotten it first in comedy. It’s kind of safe and we don’t have to admit that we don’t really understand it at all. We understand just enough to pay attention later. And I love this effect because it really points to the ways that serious journalism and comedy don’t need to compete. They actually work together. And if we are strategic, we can start to find ways to make that really purposeful instead of talking about this information economy where we’re just bemoaning the fact that all our news is sort of entertainment-y. Right? And so John Oliver certainly proves this point through his setting media agenda and setting an agenda for so many of us to take action. OK, so I’m slightly over time, but I want to share one quick story. So as comedy the way forward, I would say, listen, cautionary notes apply. Not without comedy people, comedy’s not the way forward. That’s really key. So comedy doesn’t work on every social issue. There’s a lot of cultural appropriate tone that you need to take. It doesn’t transfer necessarily. You have to be really careful about it. But I would say in global development storytelling, which is where I happened to have spent a lot of my time over the past four years or so, we’re not doing it enough. And actually there is so much evidence in the academic literature that shows that comedy’s frames of hope and optimism and compassion and tolerance for people are actually all the strategic ideas that we’re looking for. So if we do it, we should do it carefully. So I’m going to tell you one story really quick and bring it on back to Poop Jokes. So this is a guy named Jack Sim. He’s a social entrepreneur who goes by the alter ego Mr. Toilet. He’s very funny. I didn’t show any of his other. I mean, he’s very funny. There’s a great video about him telling Poop Jokes. But this guy is a serious social entrepreneur. He started something called the World Toilet Organization. He’s really dedicated to ending this problem that faces 2.5 billion people on earth who don’t have access to sanitation that can keep them from being ill. But the point is he has provided toilets all over the world and he’s worked directly with the UN to actually influence their sense of global priorities. And the bigger point is he has done it by telling Poop Jokes at the UN and other stuff. I don’t mean to reduce his entire career to telling Poop Jokes at the UN. But he does that too. So is comedy what we should be doing? I would leave you with a tiny soapbox moment that is my real earnest feeling about it, which is that we need to marshal our creativity and our innovation and our courage to try this because we are up against some pretty dang high odds on social issues that we care about. So that is my final moment. Thank you.