On Being Seriously Funny at Work

Working can be more fun and more productive if part of the job involves laughing. Humor can even repair broken relationships. For instance, when tension fills the room, humor can show everyone how to calm down and take a fresh look at things. Contributing humor to a team's efforts, at the right times, can help in surprisingly important ways. When people are feeling low, you can energize them; when they get too focused on the wrong thing, you can distract them; and when they get hopelessly lost, you can shake things loose and help them find a new path.

Some people are naturally funny, which mostly means that they learned how to be funny as children by watching and listening to the people around them. The rest of us have to make do by learning how to be funny as adults. The good news is that people in most workplaces are so starved for humor that making them laugh takes very little skill and even less talent.

I know. I've seen it happen. And I've even done it a few times.

And there's more good news. Using humor to make a team or work group more effective isn't as difficult as writing jokes for a professional comedian, or for a late-night talk show. Because people in your "audience" at work aren't there to be entertained, any bit of humor is an unexpected bonus. When you offer your colleagues at work something that's even a little bit funny, you're competing for laughs with an argument about why the performance of Module 77 Rev2 is better than Rev3. If you can't beat that, your problem might be even bigger than you thought.

An example of the value of funny

Let's suppose that you've volunteered to review and report on a paper about some work that was done at a competitor organization. You've read that paper, and several When you offer your colleagues at work something
that's even a little bit funny, you're competing
for laughs with an argument about why the
performance of Module 77 Rev2 is better than
Rev3. If you can't beat that, your problem
might be even bigger than you thought.other papers, and let's say that you were not impressed. You're now sitting in a meeting, and it's your turn to present your findings. Here are two possibilities:

• I've read the paper, and several others, and I'll be giving you the details, but basically, I wasn't impressed. We do have an opening here.
• When I read that paper, I honestly thought it was a spoof. But it all made sense when I looked at the author list and saw that they were all rutabagas. Seriously, I was not impressed. We do have an opening here.

Which one makes the point more effectively? Which one would be more fun? Sure, the second one — well, not for all contexts, but for most everyday team meetings, it would work very well.

The key to its effectiveness is the word rutabaga, which is an example of an inherently funny word.

How to be better at funny

Fortunately, at work you don't need to be funny enough to make a living as a comedian. All you need to do is make some people chuckle now and then. And you can accomplish that with just a few simple tools.

Know some general techniques

There are a few methods that create funny in wide varieties of situations. And combining them multiplies their effect. For example, some words are inherently funny: balloon, baboon, poppycock, nincompoops. Some images are inherently funny: a crate of banjos, an infant doing taxes. But alliteration can make a phrase funnier: a box of banjos, a toddler doing taxes. This technique is sometimes known as clash of context. [Vorhaus 1994]

Use callbacks

A callback is a direct reference to an earlier joke or idea. [Vorhaus 1994] When you make that backward reference, the laughter comes, in part, from the incompatibility of the backward reference and the present context, and, in part, from the surprise. For example, when I listed examples of inherently funny words, I could have included rutabagas. If I had, it might have been a slight tickle.

Collect inherently funny words or phrases

There are many simple tests for inherently funny words or inherently funny phrases. One that I like is the "brains" test. You just substitute the word you're testing for X in "He has the brains of a X." Compare, for instance, "He has the brains of a cow," with "He has the brains of a baboon." For some reason — maybe it's the alliteration — baboon is a little funnier. I like the alliteration theory, because "He has the brains of a bowling ball" also works. So do "He has the brains of a bag of balloons" and "He has the brains of a box of banjos."

Consider titles

Titles of papers, articles, presentations, sections of papers, and so on, are the most-read parts of these documents. Making them a little bit funny, or even just unusual, is effort well spent. It makes the paper or article memorable and repeatable.

Last words

One caution: being funny in email or text is risky, because in live conversation, you can use your tone and pace to support and enhance the funny parts. Leave email and text humor to the naturally talented. Avoid puns, too, unless you like groans.

You can find lots of funny words lists if you surf the Web a bit, but many of them have words unusable at work. Words that refer to ethnic groups, race, body parts, or bodily functions, for instance, are pretty much off limits. But even avoiding all these, the opportunities for humorous comment are nearly limitless if you're serious about being funny.  Top    Next Issue

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Footnotes

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