Humour in the workplace is no laughing matter

A laugh a minute: some specialists say that humour is a skill that can be improved like any other
10 April 2012

Zappos is one of the hippest companies in America. It began selling shoes online but now sells more than a billion dollars a year of all kinds of things, from clothes to electronics.

It is based in Las Vegas and its corporate practices include asking potential employees "How weird are you?" and providing a life coach for staff, who must sit in a red throne while they seek advice.

Its chief executive is a softly spoken 31-year-old computer science graduate from Harvard, Tony Hsieh, who made his first multi-million dollar fortune in his twenties and will make another when he sells Zappos.

In an interview with Inc. magazine he was asked what skill he would most like to improve. He said: "Humour. I've been researching the science of humour, and I think it can be learned like any skill."

Businesses and individuals spend billions every year trying to learn to be funny.

There are organisations like Toastmasters International, which gather small groups of people around the world to weekly meetings where they can practise their public-speaking and joke-telling skills.

There are men like John Kinde, a "humour specialist" based in Las Vegas, who coaches corporations.

Kinde says: "Those who are terminally humour-challenged are in a very small minority and nearly everyone can become better at using humour than they already are."

He recommends starting with observational humour. In meetings, try to spot something funny, a misplaced sign, an absurdity in the discussion. When you're feeling confident, drop it into the conversation.

Business-school professors have written papers on humour in the workplace. Chris Robert, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, published one called The Case for Developing New Research on Humor and Culture in Organizations: Toward a Higher Grade of Manure.

The manure was a reference to a remark by Ernest Hemingway: "It always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

Professor Robert makes the case that humour at work increases creativity, leading to improved problem solving and innovation and happier employees. Jokes about work bring employees together.

"Humour isn't incompatible with goals of the workplace," he claimed.

"In fact, we argue that humour is pretty important. It's not just clowning around and having fun, it has meaningful impact on cohesiveness in the workplace and communication quality among workers.

"The ability to appreciate humour, the ability to laugh and make other people laugh has physiological effects that cause people to become more bonded."

The New Yorker writer Jim Holt studied the history, art and science of jokes in a superb book published last year, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.

"He's right," he says of Hsieh's claim that we can learn humour. "You don't have to be a comic genius to be funny.

"Humour can be learned, like any other skill. You just have to practise for 10,000 hours, as Malcolm Gladwell has taught us" - a reference to the claim that to be good at anything takes 10,000 hours of practice.

There is, as Hsieh claims, a science of humour, which generally focuses on the insight that most of it is based on incongruity.

The classic joke contains something that seems contradictory (horse walks into a bar) and a punch-line that resolves it (barman says: "Why the long face?"). Incongruity jokes rely on shared assumptions.

If these are not there, because of language or cultural differences, if you work for a multinational corporation, for example, such jokes can be disastrous.

Holt says stand-up comics are protective of the science of humour, though pieces of it do leak out.

One trick is the "rule of three". "Don't say 'Look at Joey, he's such a fat pig.' That's not funny. Use the rule of three. 'Every day at noon, Joey eats a Big Mac, a foot-long hot dog and a pepperoni pizza - and then he has lunch.'"

Another rule is to use words with the letter k. "No one quite understands why, but stand-up comics know from long experience that it works. 'Cupcake' = funny. 'Tomato' = not funny."

There are also things that are just funny, says Holt, like cheese.

"English music-hall performers could always get a guaranteed laugh out of cheese. It renders even very grave subjects humorous.

"In the early days of the Aids epidemic, Auberon Waugh used to say that Aids was scientifically known to be curable by eating massive quantities of cheese. Another reliable formula for being funny is pretentious ignorance, which takes relatively little practice. 'Is Botticelli a wine or a cheese? I can never remember.'"

Holt says these are empirical rules which can be learned and "algorithmically programmed into a BlackBerry". But then comes practice.

The wrong kind of practice, he says, was that inflicted by Evelyn Waugh on his son James, who, he feared, had no sense of humour.

Waugh demanded that James tell him a new joke every day. James finally bought a book of 1,001 American jokes and told one each day at lunchtime to his stony-faced father.

The right kind of practice, says Holt, is much harder to define. The comedian Lewis Black, who now sells out Carnegie Hall in New York, told Holt that when he began his career in small clubs, he was funny provided he sat at a table.

The moment he stood up on stage, his act fell to pieces. "It took me 10 years to get my funny to travel the 10 feet from the table to the stage," said Black.

The science of humour, then, is the easy part. The rest of it is the killer.

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