The effects of various laughter-provoking stimuli on audiences remains an area little studied. A handful of experiments [ 1, 6, 7, 10, 11, 131 have investigated the question of what, if any, persuasive impact results from exposure to humor or wit, with generally negative or equivocal results. The effect of humor's inclusion in informative discourse upon information retention has received little attention, too, even though speech textbook authors from Aristotle to Zelko have offered advice on the use of humor, with little consensus.Textbook authors most often suggest humor as a means to maintain interest or attention. Dickens [3], for instance, discusses the use of humor in a chapter on "Gaining Audience Attention,"while Brigance[B] urges: ". . . remember that apt anecdotes and brief humorous stories heighten interest, and also reinforce serious If the judicious use of humor in informative speaking does heighten the critical factors of interest and attention, it should result in greater learning; whether this actually occurs should be of interest to communication scholars. In fact, almost any audience reaction to humor in messages should be of interest to them. How, for instance, does the use of such humor affect the speaker's ethos? No known study has posed this particular question.Little study has been conducted on the effect of humor on information retention. KilpeIa [ lo], although primarily testing for attitude change resulting from humorous and nonhumorous persuasive speaking, administered an objective test of the information contained in his speeches. He found no significant difference in retention between his experimental and control groups. Taylor [15] found similar negative results, using a humorous informative speech and the same speech with the humor deleted.In contrast to this pair of studies, Gibb [4] reports statistically significantly greater gains in knowledge of biology resulting from a points."
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