Humor at Work
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If you find that lightness and humor at work are hard, then you are not alone. Globally, we take work as serious business. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Labor found that nearly 3 in 5 employees (59%) reported negative mental health impacts due to work stress.
The image illustrates the irony from workplaces and how levity is a heavy lift! I have been fortunate to work at the world’s most amazing companies which strive to create a fun environment. However, it was common to encounter the terms on the rock in the image. For example, I have been in “War Rooms” setup to handle difficult situations, yet, I have been as close to war as the non-existent hair on my head. The ubiquitous "deadline" traces back to the American Civil War. It referred to a physical line or boundary around a prison camp. Prisoners were warned that if they crossed this line, they would be shot by the guards. Have you encountered, set, or missed a deadline? If you are like me, the answer is a big “Yes.” I am alive to tell you, please shift to “due date.” It is overdue and your heart might thank you! Sometimes lightness is that simple!
Finding ways to make work lighter is one way for both leaders and their teams to contribute to their well-being and the well-being of the organization. In this letter, I outline how it helps to inject humor into the workplace and perhaps boost productivity, and also the tips and skills to find and create constructive humor.
The importance of humor
Lightness and Laughter
Finding the Funny at work
Don’t do this - the obvious stuff
The Importance of Humor
Each of you reading this letter is a high-performing achiever and for most of you the job is rewarding and comes with high-stakes. Stress is part of your workday. Adding humor to your day and to your team’s day is an antidote to the stress. Even one burst of laughter, a component of humor, reduces cortisol (stress hormone) levels by over 36%. In addition, constructive humor can improve relationships inside and outside the workplace, lead to better deals, and increase creativity.
Dr. John Oghalai, Surgeon and Chair of the Caruso Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at USC, is intentional with his use of laughter to allow his customers (i.e. patients) to relate to him. In his words, “I try to build a relationship with my patients by trying to figure out some way to share a laugh with them. Some people are so nervous when they come to see me it is challenging. If patients like me, I believe they share more about their concerns with me. This in turn lets me provide better and more personalized care for them.”
In the workplace, having a sense of humor improves others' perception of us. A Robert Half survey found that 91% of executives believe a sense of humor is important for career advancement; while 84% feel that people with a good sense of humor do a better job.
As a leader, having the ability to laugh with your employees and finding good humor ties into authenticity. Your team will find you more relatable and trustworthy. That is invaluable in today’s trust deficit in workplaces.
I will venture that most of you already believe that lightness and humor is important in the workplace. If you still want convincing, Humor Seriously from Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas is both a course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a book with several anecdotes about the benefits of humor in the workplace. Most likely if you avoid humor, it is because the cultivation of it is likely daunting. No one wants themselves to attempt humor, only to have it fall flat, or worse that it come off as offensive. The good news is that most workplaces are so dry that there is great payoff with small efforts. In the next chapters I will cover some practical tips to help in the journey.
Resources:
Humor Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas - https://a.co/d/1wHKc0A
Laughter as Medicine Research Publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37220157/
Robert Half Accountemps Survey: https://press.roberthalf.com/news_releases?item=1340
Practicing Lightness and Laughter at work
Humor at work can begin with introducing lightness and laughter into your moments and the day. It begins with a mindset of lightness. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from John McCabe, SVP and Head of Operations at PayPal. Sensing my wariness about taking on more responsibility on the career ladder, John gently mentioned - “No matter how big of a mistake you make (at work), no one dies.” Fear of not being enough or failing is rampant in our high-performing careers. Our jobs are consequential and we are accountable to our customers and our teams but thankfully for the most part, we have evolved past the caveman. So if you take the wrong turn or fall asleep in a meeting, there isn't a saber-toothed tiger, ready to pounce. Hopefully this provides perspective that we can lighten up at work and still thrive.
As individuals, teams, and organizations, we go through difficult times and high-stakes. A good leader can facilitate the team and the organization to keep perspective while persevering through to an eventual outcome. One of the best known leaders, Abraham Lincoln, was known for using humor to lighten the mood during the twists and turns of the civil war - “As his responsibility grew and became almost unendurable he took to telling jokes again, trying to lessen the tensions in himself and those around him.” If Lincoln could manage to do it facing the Civil War, we can do it facing our zoom call.
Key Insight 1: Even if it seems like it, high stakes and humor are not at odds. In fact, a mindset of lightness might allow for higher productivity and enable better resolution.
Key Insight 2: Find ways to laugh and with others at work. If laughing is hard, a smile works wonders. In fact, even self-induced laughter (i.e forced or faked) has been shown to provide physiological benefits. Laughter is also contagious. Laughter Yoga, a yoga practice founded in the belief that laughter carries physiological benefits, uses the contagious nature of laughter to induce full-on belly laughs in groups.
Resources:
Laughter Yoga International: https://www.laughteryoga.org/
The Humorous Mr. Lincoln: https://www.amazon.com/Humorous-Mr-Lincoln-Keith-Jennison/dp/B000NWV8HY
Finding the Funny at Work
There was a time when I was an aspiring professional comic. In the San Francisco comedy scene, I ran comedy rooms, worked alongside some of the most successful comics of today, and occasionally got paid. Eventually I gave up competing for the most Laughs Per Minute (LPMs), and settled into my next job as a product manager for a payments company. The experience did teach me that while a great joke at a club might kill (like Haha!), at work it is overkill. And likely inappropriate. Being funny at work is gentler and simpler.
For this section, I will frame that the objective of your being funny at work is to lighten the mood of a co-worker, customer, or a team. In the process, you lighten your mood as well! Here are a few simple techniques and tips to get you started. For the more advanced corporate jokesters, I will need to defer the grad school joke-making skills to another letter, or check out one of the references below.
Tip 1: Begin with the mindset that success is getting a simple smile including a mercy smile. An actual laugh is an unexpected bonus. With that affirmation, a good start is to re-tell jokes and puns that someone has already created and that resonate with you. It is a light lift and you can begin practicing delivery and others will appreciate your making an effort. One of the sales leaders I worked with would find a way to work-in one of his favored puns into meetings (he claimed they were hand downs from his Dad). For e.g., “Thank God for shades, otherwise it would be curtains for all of us.” It gave him a perfect ice-breaker arriving in a sunny meeting room with shades needing to be pulled and the much-needed disarming for a sales pitch. Even if he would earn some ‘ouches and grimaces, most attendees would be smiling and more often than not someone else would break out their favorite pun.
In today’s world of AI, ChatGPT is able to generate plenty of groans and smile invoking puns for you. I have gone ahead and tried it out. Here is an example of one I found funny: “A diamond is just a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well.” For you leaders, I can see multiple ways of being able to extend that pun to a given context.
Tip 2: Generate new puns with wordplay. One cornerstone of humor is creating unexpected connections. Wordplay puns are often considered funny because they exploit the multiple meanings of words or similar sounds to create humor. Generating new ones will give you a sense of accomplishment and might give you the opportunity to share an ironic and relevant observation. Keep on the lookout for routine work terminology and wherever you find irony, you might find a gem of a pun. For e.g in this era of remote work, “Sorry I ran a little late, if it wasn’t for google meet, I would have Zoom’d to the call.” Notice that the attempted funny “Zoom’d” comes at the end. That is the punchline with the preceding phrases doing the setup.
Tip 3: Create a joke using the List of Three. This is one of the most known joke structures and easiest to deploy. The list of three establishes a premise and then sets an expectation for the premise with the first two phrases. The third one is a twist and a punchline while still within the premise. For e.g. “Going to work after being remote is hard, I had to buy work clothes, commute, and then I learned that everyone is taller than me.” Here the premise is that going into work is hard, with the first two statements leading the listeners down an expectation of the litany of things that being in-office requires. The punchline is then the irony of not knowing the full physicality of people on video calls during remote work. Also it works if the person delivering it is short (works for me!), but there can be other variations i.e. “and then I learned that I am not the tallest in the room.”
With all good jokes, crucial ingredients are truth and shared pain (or assuming the pain). Here is an example from Amy Schumer: “The producers were like ‘We want you to be in the movie’ and I was like ‘Oh my God, me?’ They were like, ‘Yes, we just need you to do three things. One, Just be yourself. Two, Have fun. And Three, Stop eating food.’ Now I was like, ‘wait a minute…’” In addition to the rule of three, the joke works because we have a shared assumption around the pain of being heavier than the desired cultural norm and Amy Schumer is sharing the truth about her being above the norm.
As you work on your humor skills, take heart that even the best find it hard. It takes a comic roughly 5 years to build a 1 hour set of original material. Each phrase (or variant) in the set is honed until the comic knows exactly how to deliver the line based on the audience and the situation in the room. The New York times interactive (#3 in the resources below) is a good illustration of what it takes.
Resources:
The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How to say something funny about anything by Sara Holloway: https://a.co/d/iiIyAb4
The New Comedy Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Writing and Performing Stand-Up Comedy: https://a.co/d/dr0zyya
The hard work of making comedy: Honing a Joke
Don’t Do this - The Obvious Stuff
The below will generally fit within your existing HR training and clarify some bounds for appropriate humor. If you have been invited to a recent remedial 1-on-1 with HR, then better to remedy those than attempt the funny.
Laugh with and not at others: Finding a way to laugh or smile with others is great! Laughing at someone including a group, even one that is not in the meeting can be a problem.
Poke fun at observations about a situation and not about a group of people. I break the rule with my joke about my being short. Also I include the Amy Schumer joke about weight. Since both are self-deprecating, and speak to a shared pain and not a putdown for a group, they work out ok.
You can only joke about the pain that you have gotten over. If the pain is still raw, your phrasing will reflect the anger at the pain. Wait till it won’t be a rant.
Sarcasm is only funny if it is directed elsewhere unrelated to the workspace.
Politics, Religion, ethnicity are generally off-limits for most work-settings.
When in doubt, introspect whether you are sticking to your objective of lightening the mood of a co-worker, customer, or a team. This intentionality will keep you from straying too far.
