Who’s allowed to be funny?

I've written before about the importance of laughter at work. The feedback on the blog was great, but on reflection, there’s a piece I unwittingly left out and it’s probably the piece that matters most.

We talk about humour as if it were free. Lighten up, be more human, don't take yourself too seriously, give us a smile and so on, which is mostly good advice. It just assumes that injecting humour ‘costs’ everyone the same, when in reality, it doesn't.

Researchers at Wharton and Harvard University ran eight experiments on humour and status and here’s what they found. 

If you manage to successfully land a joke, you read as confident and competent, and your standing goes up. Misjudge one and you read as confident and incompetent, which is a worse place to be than having said nothing at all. 

Humour, therefore, can often feel like a bet on your own status, in public.

If you’ve ever tried to be funny (and God knows, I’ve tried many many times) and the laugh you thought you’d get never materialises, you know exactly what I mean.

If humour is a status bet, the people best placed to make it are the ones who already hold status. Misjudge a joke as a senior manager and it’s explained away as them ‘having an off day’ or ‘that’s what they’re like, you’ll get used to it’.

Misjudge the very same joke from lower down the organisation chart and it can be career limiting or a sign that you're ‘not quite the right fit’. The joke might be identical, yet the downside definitely isn't.

Yet the graduate, the new starter, the person still learning the ropes are not humourless. Their silence isn't an absence of wit. It's an accurate reading of the risk of getting it wrong or else they’ve not been provided with the permission to do so.

Which is why, when we admire the ‘fun’ team, we're admiring the manager who made it safe for people to take the risk. Their jokes land because the room is already on their side. I like to think I was this kind of manager.

Humour at work isn't a personality trait you have or lack. It's permission and if you change who's ‘allowed’ to be funny and remove the embarrassment and jeopardy, you'll have changed something much bigger.