Spring is here. Well — it's Ohio, so "here for now" is probably more accurate. But I got outside for a run this week in actual sunshine, sixty degrees, birds doing their thing, and honestly? Borderline transcendent.

I'm not taking it for granted. There could be a snowstorm by Tuesday.

The less welcome news: I just picked up a new class with way more students than usual. Plus a five-part webinar to design. Plus conference submissions to review. Right now, I'm somewhere between energized and completely in over my head.

Thanks for reading!
​

Supported by iSpring

Your portfolio shouldn’t just show what you built—it should prove how you think. In this free March 5 session, Anna Poli (Senior Instructional Designer at iSpring) will show you how to design and host an ID portfolio that gets attention. You’ll get practical guidance, the recording, a certificate, and an eLearning guide.

​Learn to Build a Portfolio That Gets Noticed →​

​
What if the funniest part of your training was also the most memorable?

That's not a hypothetical. There's a neurological reason it happens — and it should inform your learning design.

Snickers has run the same comedic premise for over 40 years. "You're not you when you're hungry." Absurd. Sticky. Deliberate. Brands don't spend decades on a joke by accident.

Here's why it works

One leading explanation: stress hormones suppress memory, and humor dials them down. A 2014 Loma Linda University study made this concrete — participants who watched a funny video after a memory exercise recalled 44% of material. Those who sat in silence recalled 20%. Same time. Same content. Twice the retention.

But the finding that should change your next design decision comes from Kaplan and Pascoe. They compared students who learned with humor tied directly to concepts against those who learned without it. Immediate comprehension scores? Nearly identical. Six weeks later? The humor group retained significantly more.

Humor doesn't just feel good in the moment. Connected to your content, it compounds.

What this means when you're designing

The humor has to connect to the concept. That's the whole game.

Unrelated humor — the random joke, the funny stock photo, the icebreaker with no link to the content — didn't produce the retention advantage. But when a funny example illustrates a rule, the joke and the rule get encoded together. Pull one thread, you get both. That's not a nice-to-have. That's the mechanism.

This doesn't mean writing a stand-up routine. It means asking one question at each key concept: Can I make this unexpected, absurd, or amusing — and still make the point?

Here's what that looks like in practice. Imagine a compliance course where the "what not to do" scenario features a character so catastrophically overconfident he CC's the entire company on a confidential email. It's funny. It's specific. And six weeks later, your learners still remember exactly what not to do — because they remember him.

That's the difference between humor as decoration and humor as design.

Also supported by Neovation

Your files are just sitting there. Join us Monday, February 23, at 12 pm CT, and we'll show you how to turn them into a 24/7 Active Coaching engine—virtual mentorship, real skill-building, zero extra headcount.

→ Save Your Spot: Turn Your Content into Coaching​

​
Worth your attention
​

​Laughing and Learning​

Prevent your training event from turning into a group nap by swapping the dry recitations for a dose of humor; after all, it’s much harder for a learner to drift off when they’re busy laughing, and humor sticks in the memory far better than a slide full of boring bullet points.

​https://blog.alleninteractions.com/bid/103865/Make-Em-Laugh-4-Ways-to-Create-e-Learning-Courses-with-Humor​

​All Kidding Aside: Humor Increases Learning at the Comprehension Level​

Hackathorn et al., 2012. Peer-reviewed, semester-long study. Good ammunition for using humor with skeptical stakeholders.

​https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ956757.pdf​

​Make 'Em Laugh: 4 Ways to Create eLearning Courses with Humor​

Ditch the dry corporate-speak for unexpectedly human language and absurdist examples. By injecting a little "chuckle factor" into the digital void, you transform a forgettable course into a memorable experience that actually sticks.

​https://blog.alleninteractions.com/bid/103865/Make-Em-Laugh-4-Ways-to-Create-e-Learning-Courses-with-Humor​

​
The Bottom Line

Humor isn't decoration. Connected to the concept you're teaching, it becomes a retrieval cue — something that helps learners pull information back when they need it most. Snickers didn't run the same joke for 40 years because their writers got lazy. They ran it because it works.

One more thing — designing this way is a LOT more fun for us. You already knew that. Now you have the research to prove it to everyone else.

🎵 Today I'm listening to Howard Jones
​(Does anyone remember him?)

📍Where I'll be next

• ​LearnTec, May 5-7 (Karlsruhe, Germany)
• ​ATD International Conference, May 17-20 (Los Angeles, CA)
• ​Canadian eLearning Conference, May 29( Niagra Falls,ON)

If today’s issue was useful, my book Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro goes deeper on designing learning that earns attention and drives action. And if you’ve read it, a short review helps more than you might think.