I'm Alan Alda, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

Welcome to the 420th episode of Clear and Vivid. I'm here with our executive producer Graham Ched to give you a

glimpse of a few of the shows we have lined up for you as we begin season 34, conversations that

are fun and full of insight, as well are some great stories. In fact, the power of stories to help

with connecting and communicating is a major theme of

this season's episodes. And we start off with some wonderful stories from comedian Chris Duffy,

talking with you about something you hold dear. I love how humor can do more than just make

you laugh. Chris has a new book called Humor Me that is not only very funny. It's also an

exploration of how laughter can root us in the moment, make us see things in new ways, and above all,

connect us. He weaves together stories from his own life to suggest there are three what he calls

pillars or categories for how to find humor. The first one is

being present in the moment, noticing things. Here's Chris. I think of presence as noticing the strange

and absurd things in the world. You can't laugh at something if you don't actually notice it, right?

You know, one way that I think about this, which is I'm so sorry to bring down the level of your

podcast to my level here, my very immature level, but I think about it as the first time you go

into someone's bathroom, right? Which is like, you walk into a bathroom for the first time,

you notice so much about that bathroom. You notice where is the toilet paper? Do they put the toilet paper over the top, or do they have it hanging down the back like a mullet? That's the first thing I check. Yeah, and the correct way is clearly over the top. Over the top, but I try to find out if certain kind of person puts it under deliberately or over it. Oh, well, a person who puts it under deliberately is a delinquent. That is a person who has deep psychological issues that need to be resolved. What else do you do? Do you go through their medicine chest? Of course. You look at it, you open the cabinet, you go, what kind of lotion do they have in here? What kind of soap? You look at the toilet seat. Does it have like a thick pad? Like they're just sitting on the toilet for a long time reading a book? Do they have a pile of magazines next to the toilet? Do the magazines look like maybe they were wet and then dry? How did that happen? Do I even want to know? You notice all these things the first time you go in. But when you go back a few times, you don't notice it anymore. It has become background noise. And so I think about trying

in my own life to go into that new bathroom frame of mind as often as I can to actually be seeing

the stuff rather than to just think, this is bathroom, to actually see what the bathroom is,

to actually see what the road that I'm walking down that I take my kid to school

is, to see what my commute to work actually looks like, to notice the other people on the subway,

rather than just being in this, you know, auto play, background blur mode, where you're not actually

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