How can you get ahead in your career and still enjoy the ride?
One solution frequently offered is to use humor. Sharing jokes, sarcastic quips, ironic memes and witty anecdotes, the advice goes, will make you more likable, ease stress, strengthen teams, spark creativity and even signal leadership potential.
Our research shows that it’s harder to be funny than most people think. The downside of cracking a bad joke is often larger than what you might gain by landing a good one.
Fortunately, you don’t have to tell sidesplitting jokes to make humor work for you. You can learn to think like a comedian instead.
Comedy works by bending and breaking norms – and when those rules aren’t broken in just the right way, it’s more likely to harm your reputation.
We developed the “benign violation theory” to explain what makes things funny – and why attempts at humor so often backfire. Essentially, humor arises when something is both wrong and OK at the same time.
People find jokes funny when they break rules while seeming harmless. Miss one of those ingredients, and your audience won’t appreciate it. When it’s all benign and there’s no violation, you get yawns. When it’s all violation and not benign, you could end up triggering outrage.
And what feels wrong but OK to one colleague can feel just wrong to another, especially across differences in seniority, culture or gender.
In our experiments, when everyday people are asked to “be funny,” most attempts land flat or cross lines.
Being funny without being offensive is of paramount importance. This is particularly true for women, as the literature shows that women face harsher backlash than men for behavior seen as offensive or norm-violating.
The bottom line is that telling a great joke rarely gets you a promotion. And cracking a bad one can jeopardize your job. Instead of trying to be funny on the job, we recommend focusing on what we call “thinking funny” – as described in Peter McGraw’s book “Shtick to Business.”
“The best ideas come as jokes,” advertising legend David Ogilvy once said. “Try to make your thinking as funny as possible.”
But Ogilvy wasn’t telling executives to crack jokes in meetings. He was encouraging employees to think like comedians by flipping expectations, leveraging their networks and finding their niche.
Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign, which the company rolled out on Black Friday in 2011 as a full-page newspaper ad, paradoxically boosted sales by calling out overconsumption.
To apply this method, pick a stale assumption your team holds, such as having more meetings will lead to smoother coordination, and ask, “What if the opposite were true?”
Many of the best comics don’t try to please everyone. They succeed by deliberately narrowing their audience. And we find that businesses that do the same build stronger brands.
Likewise, you can succeed in business by deciding whom your idea is for, and whom it’s not for, then tailoring your product, policy or presentation accordingly.
Stand-up may look like a solo act. But comics depend on feedback – from fellow comedians and audiences – iterating jokes in the same way startups may innovate products.
Building successful teams at work means listening before speaking, making your partners look good and balancing roles. Improv teacher Billy Merritt has described three types of improvisers. Pirates are risk-takers. Robots are structure builders. Ninjas are adept at both. A team designing a new app needs all three.
Telling someone to “be funny” is like telling them to “be musical.” Many of us can keep a beat, but few have what it takes to become rock stars. That’s why we argue that it’s smarter to think like a comedian than to try to act like one.
By reversing assumptions, cooperating to innovate and creating chasms, professionals can generate fresh solutions and stand out – without becoming an office punchline.
Peter McGraw is a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Adam Barsky is an associate professor of management at the University of Melbourne. Caleb Warren is a marketing professor at the University of Arizona. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
