Why Is Humor Important?

I love to start talks with a joke. Here’s a favorite:

Two mathematicians are in a hot air balloon, and they get blown off course. They lower the balloon near a corn field and ask the farmer, “Where are we?” The farmer answers, “You’re in a balloon.” Then the wind carries them away. The one mathematician turns to the other and says, “He must have been a mathematician.” The second one asks, “Why?” The first one says, “Because the answer he gave us was 100% accurate and totally useless.”

We spend much of our waking lives at work. In the U.S., in fact, we have a bad habit of prioritizing work over family and friends. (For a different way of looking at the world, I recommend a quick breeze through The Year of Living Danishly, about how they do this in a more enlightened culture.) Consequently, if we don’t have fun at work, we don’t have that much fun in life.

It’s even harder to have fun when your company’s growth is slowing. My old boss Tom Monahan used to say, “Growth companies have problems, and stagnant companies have problems, but I would much rather have the problems that growth companies have.” That’s because stagnant companies tend to have fewer opportunities for promotion, more rules and less room for innovation, more punishment for messing up and fewer rewards for taking risks, and many other, similar problems. That can get depressing.

Even if you’re working on pretty weighty topics, bringing a sense of humor can help. It just makes the workday more bearable. It actually fosters innovation. It diffuses conflict in the right way without making barriers to constructive disagreement. It makes people more productive. It improves employee retention.

And it’s pretty easy.

My old nonprofit team used to have dress-up days (look at the thumbnail photo for one of my favorites, “steam punk day”). A few times by accident, two of us twinned outfits, so we turned it into a light and funny tradition. It didn’t cost money, it didn’t take time out of the workday, but it was a way to bond and to make our jobs more fun.

Next time you feel like you’re running on the hamster wheel, take a moment to tell a joke, read an online comic or do whatever lightens the mood for your team. The first time feels weird, but the habit feels great.