Humor in the Workplace

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If someone makes a sexually charged comment, but they use humor to do it, should we blame humor or should we blame the person's intentions? We don't want to shoot the messenger.

In the same sense, doesn't humor also give employees the freedom to criticize or complain about their jobs?

Sure. If the business owner or manager is someone who doesn't respond well to direct challenges from employees, they might find a way to criticize indirectly with humor. In that case, I'd advise the business owner to take the message seriously. The person making the joke might be challenging you, which could be a problem, or you might be getting a subtle communication from one employee that other employees also feel. If an employee makes a joke about a supervisor, other people probably agree with that joke. Humor producers know that other people are listening to their joke and they're more likely to make it if they think the others will appreciate it.

In that sense, humor can be used effectively by the business owner to understand how employees are thinking. It could create an opportunity for you to address a complaint or criticism that you wouldn't hear about otherwise.

How did your study find that humor relates to workplace creativity?

The primary theory about humor, which is well accepted, is that it stems from incongruity. In other words, we find jokes or comments funny because they are linking two things together—perhaps through a punch line—that you wouldn't normally link together, or that shouldn't go together. Essentially, that's what creativity is, too: Putting things together in a unique way, like using the Internet for something people wouldn't have thought of before.

It's likely that some of the same neural processes enable both humor and creativity, so those two things kind of go hand in hand. A number of studies show that a funny person is also likely to be a very creative person.

How do your findings translate to the hiring decisions that small business owners have to make?

That's an interesting issue, and in fact we're working on a paper about that right now. Should you select the funny guy for a job? I don't necessarily think you want to select the class clown, someone who's constantly joking and has to be the center of attention all the time. That could be too much for a workplace, it could get distracting for the other employees, and any boss would probably have valid worries about that kind of person. But if you can get some more subtle indicators in an interview that someone has a good sense of humor—say, they appreciate humor or they find things funny—that might be someone you want to have around. The other thing is that humor is viral. When someone's laughing, it's kind of contagious and it can spread a positive general benefit to the workplace.

Karen E. Klein is a business journalist who covers small-business issues for several national publications. She writes her Smart Answers column twice a week.