Funny Business
I'm someone who's lucky enough to have humour as my top-notch character strength — and let me tell you, I've seen firsthand how powerful laughter can be in the workplace. Seriously, did COVID-19 even happen if a coworker didn't send you that video of 'cat lawyer' Rod Ponton saying "I'm not a cat" during a virtual court appearance? If you haven't seen it yet, click here. It still makes me laugh!
With April Fools Day just around the corner, it got me thinking about this fine line between workplace pranks and workplace professionalism.
In a workplace, laughter can be the magic glue that holds us together, strengthening social bonds, making us feel like we belong, and helping us understand each other better. Plus, it's a genuine mood booster, lifting our spirits, and zapping away stress by releasing those feel-good hormones. But remember slap-gate when Will Smith had a physical go at comic Chris Rock over a joke Smith didn't find funny? While humour is great for lifting our moods and bonding us together, there are times when it just doesn't hit the mark, or worse, leaves a mark.
So, how can you tap into your humour superpowers without crossing any Occupational Health and Safety Laws or getting slapped in the face?
Well, according to the science, there are four main humour styles that serve different purposes in our interactions. Knowing these can help you pick the one that's most likely to get everyone laughing.
Self-Enhancing Humour: Boosting Wellbeing: This is about using humour to lift your own spirits, even in tough times. It's like finding the silver lining in any situation. At work, it's your secret weapon for handling stress and keeping positive vibes flowing. By embracing this kind of humour, you can build up resilience and spread optimism and creativity around the office.
Affiliative Humour: Building Bonds: This one's all about using humour to bring people closer together. It's like the glue that bonds you with your coworkers. Sharing a good laugh breaks down barriers, opens up communication, and makes the workplace feel like one big happy family. Sprinkling in some affiliative humour creates a warm and welcoming vibe where everyone feels valued.
Aggressive Humour: Crossing the Line: On the flip side, there's aggressive humour. This is when you use humour to boost yourself up by putting others down. Sure, a bit of playful teasing can be harmless, but too much can turn the workplace into a toxic zone of bullying and disrespect — and nobody wants that.
Self-Defeating Humour: Disarming Tensions: This is all about using humour to make connections with others, even if it means poking fun at yourself. It's like diffusing a tense situation with a good ol' self-deprecating joke. But too much of it can undermine your credibility and confidence. So it's all about finding the right balance between humility and self-assurance.
When it comes to nailing the humour game at work, the sweet spot is pretty simple in theory and occasionally mortifying in practice: be a human, not a highlight reel. If you're in a leadership role, that means being the one who models what good-natured looks like — the person who can laugh at themselves when the situation calls for it, who shuts down a joke that's punching down without making it a whole tribunal, and who genuinely enjoys the people they work with rather than performing enjoyment at them.
It also means paying attention. Humour lands differently depending on who's in the room, what's been happening that week, and whether someone's having a quietly terrible day that nobody knows about yet. You don't need a policy for that. You just need to be paying attention.
And if you get it wrong? Acknowledge it, move on, don't spiral. Self-defeating humour in moderation is actually great for this — nothing defuses an awkward moment faster than a leader who can say "yeah, that didn't land, my bad" and mean it.
So here's your homework, and I promise it's the most enjoyable kind: notice what's making you laugh this week. Is it with people or at them? Is it bringing you closer to your colleagues or quietly building distance? Is it the kind of funny that everyone can be in on, or the kind that requires someone to be the punchline?
Humour is one of the 24 character strengths in the VIA classification — and it's one of the most underrated tools in any leader's kit. Not because laughter fixes things, but because it signals safety. It says: we can be human here. And in workplaces that are genuinely trying to get psychosocial safety right, that signal matters more than most people realise.
As the late comedian Cal Wilson put it — the world needs more laughter. And she wasn't wrong. But the best workplace laughter isn't manufactured or mandated. It's what happens when people actually feel good enough to let their guard down.
That's worth building towards.