John Morreall (pronounced Mor-el), is not only professor of religion and department chair at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, US, he also runs Humorworks, which, amongst other things, conducts corporate seminars on the subject of humor, with clients such as the Internal Revenue Service, The World Bank, and Ernst & Young.
Thus he investigates the possibilities for things that make people LAUGH and then PAY. Here’s a suggestion regarding IRS tax-demands :
“If you can get people to laugh, and realize that they owe you money, and pay up [that’s] much more successful.”
BONUS: Some say the human condition is a tragedy, others say it’s a comedy – or perhaps a comic tragedy, or maybe a tragicomedy. In either, all, or no cases, the professor presents a paper for the April 2014 edition of the British Journal of Aesthetics, (Volume 54, Issue 2) entitled : The Comic Vision of Life.
“Tragedy has traditionally been ranked higher than comedy, and critics often valorize the ‘tragic vision of life’. Using twenty contrasts between tragedy and comedy, I argue that there is a ‘comic vision of life’ which is superior to the tragic vision, especially in the post-heroic era in which we live.”