Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, & Inside Jokes : A User’s Guide to Humour at Work

"Research by us and others has shown that humour can influence and reinforce status hierarchies in groups, build interpersonal trust and highquality work relationships, and fundamentally shape the way people perceive one another’s confidence, competence, warmth, and clarity of communication"

Humour is a powerful tool that some people use instinctively but more could wield purposefully. One good laugh or better still, a workplace culture that encourages levity facilitates interpersonal communication and builds social cohesion. Analysis of large sets of workplace communications suggests that humour occurs in at least 10% of emails and is slightly more likely to be used by leaders in face-to-face interactions. But these numbers can (and should) be larger.

Research by us and others has shown that humour can influence and reinforce status hierarchies in groups, build interpersonal trust and high-quality work relationships, and fundamentally shape the way people perceive one another’s confidence, competence, warmth, and clarity of communication. It also influences critical behaviours and attitudes that matter to leadership effectiveness, including employee job performance, job satisfaction, organisational commitment, citizenship behaviours, creativity, psychological safety in groups, and desire to interact again in the future.

However, jokes that fall flat (they’re not funny, or no one laughs) or are offensive (they’re viewed as inappropriate for the context) can harm professional standing by making a joke teller appear less intelligent and less competent. They can lower status and in extreme cases cost people their jobs.

In this article, we offer guidance on how to use specific types of humour to become a more effective leader and how to avoid being the cautionary tale at your company’s next HR training seminar

HUMOUR CAN ENHANCE (OR HURT) STATUS

Humour and laughter are intricately tied to status and power. People in lower ranks who wield them well can climb the status hierarchy in their departments and organizations. Humour not only helps individuals ascend to positions of authority but also helps them lead more effectively once they are there. Professors Cecily Cooper (University of Miami), Tony Kong (University of South Florida), and Craig Crossley (University of Central Florida) found that when leaders used humour as an interpersonal tool, their employees were happier, which fostered better communication and resulted in an uptick in citizenship behaviours voluntary actions that facilitate organisational effectiveness. That is, when leaders used humour, their employees were more likely to go above and beyond the call of duty.

Here are ways to capture the benefits of humour while avoiding the contextual risks.

"Delivering negative feedback can be challenging, so it may be tempting to fall back on a joke to lighten the mood. However, couching criticism in the form of a joke can lessen its impact"

WHEN TO USE INSIDE JOKES

This form of humour happens anytime an outsider doesn’t have the background information needed to get the joke. Inside jokes are extremely common our data suggests that almost everyone has engaged in or witnessed one. But how does insider talk, especially inside jokes, affect the dynamics within a group?

In collaboration with Ovul Sezer (University of North Carolina), Maurice Schweitzer, and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School), we conducted a study to understand those effects. We asked people to engage in a brainstorming task on instant messenger. Each participant was teamed up with two of our research assistants posing as fellow participants. In one condition, one researcher sent a message to the team that the participant couldn’t read (it looked like garbled text), and then the other researcher sent a response: “I agree!” This made the participant think that the other two had exchanged information that he or she was not privy to. In the other condition, the second researcher responded to the garbled message with, “Hahaha, that’s hilarious, I agree!” It was a subtle difference in both conditions, participants were on the outside. Did it matter whether what they missed was funny? Yes. Participants were more likely to believe that their partners thought of themselves as superior in the inside-joke condition than in the inside-information condition, and they reported lower group identification and cohesion when the secret exchange involved a joke.

We’ve all experienced this phenomenon first-hand. Although, levity is typically thought of as a behaviour that binds people together, it can draw fault lines in a group, making some people feel awkward and excluded. Inside jokes have their place, of course. They can signal closeness or camaraderie, making people feel pleased to be in the loop. This kind of humour can be useful in transactional or non consequential situations when it doesn’t matter much if an outsider doesn’t get it. But the research on this kind of humour is clear: When group cohesion is important, tell jokes that everyone can understand.

WHEN TO USE SARCASM

Despite the fact that you’re good at using sarcasm, a little more guidance won’t hurt. Research by Li Huang (INSEAD), Francesca Gino (Harvard), and Adam Galinsky (Columbia) reveals that sarcasm is not just for teenagers trying to irritate their parents; it can be useful for managers and teams as well. In their study, participants either made or received sarcastic comments or made or received sincere ones. Participants in the sarcasm condition were significantly more likely to solve a creativity task assigned later in the experiment than those in the sincere condition. In a subsequent study, participants were asked to merely recall a time when they either said or heard something sarcastic or a time they said or heard something sincere. Once again, creativity on the subsequent task was higher in the sarcasm condition.

Why does this happen? Sarcasm involves saying one thing and meaning the opposite, so using and interpreting it requires higher-level abstract thinking (compared with straightforward statements), which boosts creativity. The downside is that sarcasm can produce higher levels of perceived conflict, particularly when trust is low between the expresser and the recipient. And because sarcasm involves saying the opposite of what you mean, there’s a risk of misunderstanding or worse if the recipient does not pick up on the humorous intent and takes a sarcastic comment literally. The lesson: Unleash your sarcastic side to get creative juices flowing but tone it down with new colleagues, in unfamiliar settings, or when working in teams where strong relationships haven’t yet been built. Until you’ve established trust, it’s best to communicate with respect.

"Although, levity is typically thought of as a behaviour that binds people together, it can draw fault lines in a group, making some people feel awkward and excluded. Inside jokes have their place, of course. They can signal closeness or camaraderie, making people feel pleased to be in the loop"

WHEN TO USE SELF-DEPRECATION

During his presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy faced accusations that his wealthy father was attempting to buy the election. At the 1958 Gridiron dinner, Kennedy addressed those accusations by saying, “I just received the following wire from my generous daddy: ‘Dear Jack, don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.’”

Self-deprecating humour can be an effective method of neutralising negative information about oneself. Research by one of us (Brad) and Maurice Schweitzer found that individuals are seen as warmer and more competent when they disclose negative information about themselves using humour than when they disclose it in a serious manner. When they add humour to a disclosure, counterparts view the negative information as less true and less important. For example, the study found that job candidates who revealed their limited math ability in a humorous manner (“I can add and subtract, but geometry is where I draw the line”) were perceived as better able to do math than those who disclosed the information in a serious manner (“I can add and subtract, but I struggle with geometry”).

WHEN TO USE HUMOUR TO DODGE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS

In the second of two debates during the 1984 U.S. presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan, the incumbent, was asked if his age would impede his ability to do the job in a second term. At age 73, Reagan was already the oldest president in American history, and he was perceived as being fatigued during the first debate. The president responded by saying, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The audience, along with Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, erupted in laughter. Mondale later said it was the moment he knew he had lost the election.

Few people enjoy being asked difficult questions like the one posed to Reagan. Previous research has revealed a range of ways people can respond: by staying silent, explicitly lying, paltering (saying truthful things to deliberately mislead), or responding with another question. Using humour to dodge a question is another option that can be quite helpful in certain situations. That’s because humour is cognitively distracting, according to research by Madelijn Strick (Utrecht University) and colleagues. Just as a good magician gets the audience to look away from the sleight of hand, a successful joke can turn our attention away from certain information. Successful humour also makes us happy, and we are more likely to trust people when we are in a good mood. And as we have mentioned, funny people are seen as more intelligent and skilled. Part of the reason Reagan’s response was so effective was that his mental ability was under attack. By responding with humour (even with a scripted line, he had probably rehearsed), Reagan signalled to the audience that he was still mentally sharp.

WHEN TO USE HUMOUR TO DELIVER NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was angered when General George B. McClellan failedto attack General Robert E. Lee in Richmond. Lincoln addressed the issue in a letter to McClellan saying, “If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully, A. Lincoln.” Using humour to deliver negative feedback, as Lincoln did, can make criticism more memorable.

Delivering negative feedback can be challenging, so it may be tempting to fall back on a joke to lighten the mood. However, couching criticism in the form of a joke can lessen its impact. Peter McGraw and colleagues ran experiments in which participants reviewed complaints that were made in either a humorous or a serious manner. Although humorous complaints were better received than serious ones, they were also seen as more benign, and people felt less compelled to take action to rectify the problem.

"A life devoid of humour is not only less joyful it’s also less productive and less creative, for you and for those around you. Abundant benefits await those who view humour not as an ancillary organisational behaviour but as a central path to status and flourishing at work"

WHEN TO USE HUMOUR AS A COPING MECHANISM

Do you remember the day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election? For Donald Trump supporters, it was a happy day; for Hillary Clinton supporters, not so much. We took that opportunity to study how humour might help people cope with negative news. The day after the election, one of us (Alison) and several collaborators asked people who had voted for Clinton to write either something humorous or something meaningful about Trump’s victory. Those who sought humour in the situation felt better about it in the moment and they still felt better about it when the researchers checked back in with them months later.

Humour can be an extremely powerful coping tool, in even the toughest of circumstances. Leadership consultant Linda Henman found that American prisoners of war in Vietnam frequently used it to deal with the tough conditions they experienced. Strick and colleagues conducted studies in which they presented participants with photos of negative scenes (such as a physical assault or a car crash), followed by either a funny stimulus or a positive but not funny stimulus. Participants presented with the funny stimulus reported fewer negative emotions than did participants presented with the nonhumorous one. Why? Again, the cognitively demanding aspect of humour distracts people, leaving them less able to focus on negative information.

Other research, however, revealed that the type of humour matters. One study by Andrea Samson (University of Fribourg) and James Gross (Stanford) found that positive, good-natured humour in response to bad news made people feel better, but negative, dark, or mean-spirited jokes made them feel worse. It’s also important to be careful about offending others with jokes when a situation is ongoing or recent (“too soon”). But in general, humour can be tremendously useful in helping people cope not only during or immediately after a negative event but also over the long term.

CONCLUSION

When you think about humour as a tool of leadership, recognise that people can be funny in a variety of ways. Humour at work is a delicate dance, and humour research is still in its infancy. Scholars (including us) are gaining data-driven descriptions of how people use various kinds of humour, and of when it works and when it doesn’t. But any rules of thumb for using humour have to include a caveat: Context matters. Conversational dynamics can vary profoundly from culture to culture, person to person, and group to group. These factors are tricky to navigate and make it difficult even in the moment to know whether your humour attempt has been successful or not. Many people will laugh politely even if something isn’t funny or is in poor taste, creating an unreliable feedback loop.

If you don’t think you can land jokes at work, or you’re too nervous to try, that’s OK. Not everyone is meant to be funny, just as not every attempt at humour will be successful. (Even professional comedians have bits that bomb.) But you can still incorporate levity into your work life by doing something simple: appreciating other people’s humour. Be quick to laugh and smile. Delight in the absurdity of life and in the jokes you hear. A life devoid of humour is not only less joyful it’s also less productive and less creative, for you and for those around you. Abundant benefits await those who view humour not as an ancillary organisational behaviour but as a central path to status and flourishing at work.