Classic Insights into the Art of Humor in the Workplace
By Michael Fontaine
April Fool’s Day may be behind us, but this spring, we could all use a laugh — especially at work. In that spirit, here’s a little story:
A guy was driving down the freeway last week when his phone rang. When he answered he heard his wife’s voice frantically warning him: “John, oh my god! I just saw on the news: there’s a car going the wrong way on 280. It’s crazy! Please be careful!”
“A car going the wrong way on 280?” says John. “Hell, it’s not just one car. There’s hundreds of ‘em!”
This little story isn’t just funny. It’s dynamite for breaking up groupthink and reversing the dynamics of a meeting.
Good jokes can do that. And if you’re not using them in the workplace, it’s time to rethink that.
Jokes bring enormous benefits to any workplace setting, provided you keep them under control. Around the office, they’ll foster creativity, improve the atmosphere, and win admiration and sympathy. In meetings, pitches, and tense negotiations, they’ll break up boredom and restore attention. Even better, if you time a joke right — like our little story of the guy on the freeway — they can reverse the course of a debate 180 degrees.
But don’t just take my word for it. That’s a classic insight from ancient Rome, and it’s a time-tested strategy.
In the late Roman republic, an ambitious young man named Cicero told joke after joke in professional settings. Before long he made it all the way to the top. He won election as “Consul” (president), at the earliest qualifying age. Nobody was laughing then!
Later, in retirement, Cicero wrote all his thoughts about the art of humor down. As I was astonished to learn when I translated them recently, not much has changed. In fact, a lot of ancient wisdom has gotten lost. Classic insights and strategies are just waiting to be rediscovered, dusted off, and put back to use.
For example, why is humor so effective? One answer is that by definition, humor jolts you out of your frame of reference. It makes you suddenly appreciate there’s more than one way of seeing the world, of analyzing a situation, of choosing among ambiguities you were blind to just a moment before. In a flash, the world changes.
This helps us see why jokes are so great at fostering empathy and defusing tense situations. Jokes snap you out of the perspective you started with and get you to appreciate how someone else is assessing a situation.
Sometimes that’s true of jokes that use just a single word. Why can’t two apples get married? Because then they’d be a pair.
There’s a secondary benefit to telling jokes, too: you laugh. Why does that matter? Well, a professor in ancient Rome named Quintilian has an idea. In his view, the physical rocking of the body — your mouth pulling upward, your shoulders rocking back and forth, and so on — serve to physically break up negative emotions.
Is he right? Probably yes, probably no. Nobody really knows where emotions come from. On a chemical level something’s undoubtedly happening, and on the level of blood pressure something’s undoubtedly happening, too. But here’s the takeaway: it doesn’t really matter what is happening. All you need to know is, it works. Laughter makes you feel better. That’s the bottom line.
Cicero is adamant on this point early on in his treatise.
As for what laughter itself is, how it’s aroused, where it dwells, how it arises and erupts so suddenly that we can’t stop it even though we want to, and how it can simultaneously take over the sides, mouth, cheeks, eyes, and face — go ask Democritus for all that, because none of it is relevant to what we’re interested in, and even if it were, I’d have no trouble admitting I’m clueless, since even those who claim they do know, don’t.
The point is, you don’t need to be a Greek philosopher like Democritus or a cutting-edge neuroscientist and worry about the metaphysical origins of laughter. As you need to know, laughing exists, it works, and jokes are the way to trigger it.
Even better, laughter is infectious. That means that laughing in group settings has additive benefits. You don’t have to take yourself seriously to take the work seriously.
Of course, you don’t want to take it too far. You’re a leader or a team member, not a stand-up comedian. Cicero and Quintilian have a lot to say about that, too. As Quintilian puts it, “humor is risky, since wit is so close to twit.” It can be a fine line, so remember his mantra — and study his recommendations for tricks that’ll keep you on the right side of it.
Michael Fontaine is a Latinist in the Department of Classics at Cornell University, whose latest work is on the effective use of humor in diplomacy. Fontaine is author of the book, How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor.
