A Duck Walked in to a Staff Meeting: Comedy Techniques to Lighten Up Business

Used effectively and positively, humor can improve the workplace in many ways. Employees who laugh regularly are physically and emotionally healthier, not to mention more productive and creative. And let’s face it – it’s more fun to work with people who bring joy and laughter to work than those who **** the life out of everyone around them.

As a comedian and corporate stress management expert, I’ve been teaching organizations how to blend humor and business for almost fifteen ten years. During that time, I’ve found that many of the tricks comedians use to find the funny in everyday life can be easily and successfully used in the business world. Here are some strategies for using humor at work:

1. Accentuate the positive. In order to have a positive influence your humor must not be derogatory or divisive. Prevent negative humor from creeping into the workplace by sticking to (try duct tape or those yellow sticky pads) the following rules:

o Use your own funny stories. Humor that comes from personal experience will be perceived as less threatening to others. Here’s an example: a company vice president broke her toes by running into a table at home. That wasn’t a very exciting explanation, so when co-workers asked how she’d injured herself, she replied instead, “I was trying to climb the corporate ladder and I slipped.!”

o Focus humor on situations and circumstances not on individuals. Laughing about having to work too much overtime or lack of parking is much less likely to be hurtful than laughing at a specific person.

o Poke fun up, not down. All humor has an element of “making fun,” and if people in positions of more power make fun of those with less power, feelings will be hurt and detrimental consequences ensue. Managers should never make employees the brunt of jokes.

2. Honor humor diversity. We all find different things funny; these differences may divide along gender, age, occupation, culture, and even region of the country where an individual was raised. Studies show, for one, that men and women respond best to much different kinds of humor, with men preferring what might be called “action humor” (e.g., “The Three Stooges” or Farrelly Brothers movies), while women usually prefer “relationship humor” (e.g., Meg Ryan romantic comedies.) Encourage and respect everyone’s sense of humor, as well as their sensitivities.

3. Obey the rules of comedy. There are simple ways anyone can make something funnier, whether they’re retelling something funny that happened to them on the way to work or trying to c

o Rule #1: Universality. Everyone in the room should be able to understand the situation, the context, and the emotions behind the story. If you are in a meeting full of accountants and you keep using references to quantum physics, you’re violating the rule of universality. No wonder everyone’s eyes are glazed over like so many donuts.

o Rule #2: Be as specific and visual as possible. The better you can create a picture, the more engaged everyone will be in your presentation. It’s not an office, it’s a 7-foot x 7-foot cubicle wedged between the women’s bathroom and the elevator. It’s not a car, it’s an orange Yugo with no front door and a bumpersticker that says “Honk if you see things falling off.”

o Rule #3: When dealing with topics that are still painful to the group (e.g., lay-offs at work, new management, budget cuts, etc.), use exaggeration to keep things in perspective. Here’s an example: “Things have been really stressful at work, what with the new CEO, the changes in our job description, and the dress code that requires everyone to wear prison uniforms on Wednesdays.”

o Rule #4: It happened today (or at the latest, yesterday.) Use present tense verbs to give your story the feeling of being topical and urgent.

o Rule #5: The “K” rule. Words with the “k” sound are funnier to most Americans than other words. Next time you tell that story involving the beige Honda, make it a cr