Humour Consultant

Kate Hull Rodgers has been a humour consultant for nearly 20 years and has worked all over the world. With her actor husband, Bill Rodgers, she runs a consultancy called HumourUs in Lincolnshire, England. In addition to giving talks and workshops, she makes regular television appearances and is the author of Pearls of Bizdom: How to Go from Grit to Great (Writersworld Limited, ISBN 978-1-904181-82-8, £9.99), which is based on columns she wrote for a Sheffield newspaper. Hull Rodgers describes it as “perfect for the train or the toilet or the tired”. You can see Hull Rodgers in action on her website, www.humourus.org.uk.

Hull Rodgers spoke to Margaret Davis about humour in the workplace.

How did you become a humour consultant?

I used to be an actress and that didn’t go terribly well, so I had to reinvent myself. In fact, it went so badly that I became mentally ill and was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and that very much had to do with stress. When I got out of hospital, I didn’t want to go back into theatre, so I started teaching workshops about how to deal with stress. And what I realized was that I’d really begun to get mentally ill when I started to take myself too seriously. Gradually I developed workshops that were about humour and healing. I started with looking at the strategic use of humour to deal with stress, which then developed into the use of humour for communication skills and for employee engagement, and now all my work is in a corporate environment.

What kind of reactions do you get from participants?

When I first started working in Britain, I was met with a bit of cynicism and disdain. And because I’ve got the North American accent, it was an automatic, “Oh, right, another American idea” — even though I’m Canadian. So I really had to win people over to the idea that work was not a punishment, and that work was not “Get your head down and get on with it”. I don’t know whether the world has changed or I’ve changed and gotten better at what I do, but now when I come in, people are already on board, which is great. I used to have to do the “why”. Now I do much more of the “how”.