No joke! The workplace needs a good laugh

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

A guy dies and meets St. Peter who tells him, "Look, you've lived a good life, we do things a little differently than what you'd expect. I'm going to let you choose where you'd like to spend eternity. Hear me out, spend a day or two in heaven and in hell and then decide for yourself." The guy chooses heaven first and finds it beautiful and pleasant, the choirs of heaven singing, animals getting along, streets paved with gold. Nice.

"OK," St. Peter says. "Now spend a few days in hell." There the guy enjoys endless beach volleyball games, parties that last forever, many of his friends are there (naturally), beautiful people everywhere all laughing at his jokes, front row NBA finals tix, you name it. He rushes back to St. Peter and says, "I can't believe I'm saying this but I choose to live the eternities in hell."

He's dispatched back to Hades where he finds brimstone and burning lakes, miserable people chained to each other, and endless whippings from Satan. "Heyyy, what gives?" he yells at Lucifer, "Last week I was here and it was all fun and games and pretty women and partying!"

"Last week you were a recruit," Satan responds. "This week you're an employee!"

This joke was sent to me by Scott Christopher, co-author of the new book, “The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up,” and humor columnist for Workplace HR magazine.

He shared it after I asked him if he could dig up a funny workplace joke I could pass along to all of you.

Why? Lately I’ve noticed a lack of humor among many of the employees and managers I’ve been talking to and getting e-mails from.

One human resources manager for a major corporation in Virginia, told me, “We’ve got our people so stretched they can’t have fun.”

She surmises that workers are afraid of crossing the line for fear of being terminated, so they don’t want to do anything to stand out. “They want to fly under the radar,” she explains.

And what that means, she adds, is that “people aren’t laughing and you don’t hear joking or fun among the cubicles.”

Welcome to the increasingly humorless American workplace.

Lighten up!
Tough economic times and the perpetual threat of layoffs are gnawing away at our collective funny bone. That on top of years of ballooning political correctness in workplaces have clamped down on laughter.

And that’s bad news for productivity, creativity and the general well-being of workers, say HR and humor experts.

“It’s a natural tendency for some folks to tighten up during tough times, but we need to lighten up,” warns Joel Goodman, founder of The Humor Project Inc.

Goodman believes it was no accident that during the Great Depression, the heyday of comedy emerged with people like the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny.

Here’s a great one that came from Groucho Marx in the 1931 movie “Monkey Business”: “I've worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”

Such a wave of humor, witnessed during the Depression, has yet to hit many of the nation’s businesses, Goodman says, and it’s sorely needed “in order to balance the seriousness of the times.”

What’s exacerbating the joylessness this recession has spawned, some believe, is decades of joke slap-downs in offices and factories.

“The whole issue of political correctness has gone too far when it comes to the criteria for determining an offensive comment,” says Thierry Guedj, workplace psychology expert and professor at Boston University. “If anybody is offended, then it’s offensive. The criteria has become much too personalized. It only takes one person being slightly upset at something for it to become offensive.”

It started in the 1980s, he continues, got worse in the 1990s and “has now reached its maximum.”

And it’s not just the workplace that is seeing the anti-humor phenomenon. We see it all around us, especially during this political season.

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