Thank you for joining us for episode 374 of Live Happy Now.

We know that laughter and humor feel good, but did you realize how much good they can do?

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Shepard Siegel, a musician turned

educator whose recent research has centered around the idea of

play, playfulness, and humor as a driving force of change. His latest book, Tricking Power into Performing

Acts of Love, How Tricksters Through History Have Changed the World, looks at the trickster

archetype and the role it plays in social change.

Shepard's here today to talk about the importance of finding fun and humor in our lives and how to reclaim those habits as adults.

Shepard, welcome to Live Happy Now.

Thanks very much. It's a real pleasure to be here, Paula.

You are all about fun and humor, which is really in short supply right

now for a lot of people. One thing that really stood out about your messaging is that you say

laughter, humor, and playfulness can get this world back on track. Big question. How are we going to do

that? I've written a couple books about this, and I do look at

playfulness and how it connects to culture and how it connects to politics. And play is something

that all animals do all the time except humans. So a lot of us have kind of lost, I mean,

there are playful humans, but they stand out. They're the

exception rather than the rule. And I really got into investigating the play of very young children,

children under the ages of four and five, because that's when we are most like other animals,

and they have this intrinsic sense of playfulness and so forth. But as my research

progressed, I went to this conference about play and I met someone there and she talked to me

about the trickster archetype and realized that the trickster archetype is this personality type

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