Published Work

Laughing Your Way Through Business

Many people (except my wife, of course, who I dismiss as an exception) think I can be a funny guy. We have been married for so long and she has suffered through all my jokes multiple times that I actually sympathize with her. In fact, she has even given a number to each one of my jokes.

I have a very strong belief that humor and laughter do play an important part in business. I use humor a lot in my columns and my book to make a point. When things go well in business, it's easy to joke and laugh.

When things go badly, I am a big proponent that the more we laugh, the easier we can handle a particularly difficult situation. There are so many absurd business situations that I found myself in over the years where I could not help laugh for fear I would never stop crying.

We also all need to be able to laugh at ourselves and not take everything that happens in business so seriously. By viewing business this way, we can gain more resiliency to ride through both the good and bad times.

What roles can humor play in business?

I use it a lot to "break the ice" when I meet people for the first time or make a speech at a conference. However, I have never been much of a fan of someone who starts off a meeting or a presentation with a joke that is unrelated to their topic or industry. To me, this is trying too hard and not many of us are as good as Jerry Seinfeld at stand-up comedy.

Todd Hunt, a Chicago-based "business humorist" says: "Humor is more than 'a guy walks into a bar' joke. It's everywhere in the workplace if we only keep our eyes open." He has used humor often to diffuse hostility.

"After being introduced, I often say: I asked Joe what your time limit was for speakers today. He said: 'You can talk as long as you want but we all leave at 1:30. So I promise I will not go past 1:30 no matter what," Hunt said. "You can beg and you can plead but I'm not going one minute beyond 1:30!" Showing respect for time makes an audience receptive to Hunt's message.

At my last company, I would travel around the country with other team members giving the same presentation over and over again. To make it interesting for us, we played a game where we added imaginary words to our presentation that were not actually English.

For example, one word we once used was "referenceability," which is not a word. Whichever presenter could use that word the most during the presentation without the customer asking what the word actually meant would win the game. The presenter could get extra points if they got the customer to use the word in a sentence.

Dean Rutter, the former founder of Apartments.com and now founder of the Evanston, Ill.-based Make Baby Laugh! Company, told me of a situation that was so absurd it made him laugh.

He hired a rental agent who, in her very first month, rented 14 apartments (the best anyone had ever done). As of the middle of her second month, she had already rented 10 apartments and was well on her way to setting the single-month record. All of a sudden, though, she up and disappeared.

This was not too unusual since turnover among agents was large. Rutter tried calling and calling, until one day, her boyfriend answered and said she had gone back to her old job and to stop calling.

About four or five months later, someone was looking in the yellow pages and came across their former rental agent's picture--in the escort section! Rutter said: "That was funny enough, but then all of sudden, the entire office made this into a career path [for men and women]." The agents joked about the number of months it would take to go from agent to escort.

Rutter said this absurd situation was a good way to keep fun in a sales job that was difficult for most people to achieve their goals. Although male and female agents enjoyed this ruse, any sort of humor tied to sex can offend some people. Like with any joke, it is important to know your audience. If you have any doubt that someone may be offended, it's much better to skip it.

Mary Lee Montague at Chicago-based DHR International believes that humor is a good way to test whether you can work with someone. She added: "If it hits your funny bone, laugh and be real. If the other person doesn't find the same thing funny, move on because the two of you wouldn't make good business mates. Life is too short not to laugh along the way."

Can humor go overboard and become biting sarcasm at the expense of another person? This is a big danger when trying so hard to make people laugh.

I have stepped into this trap and ended up trying to pull both feet out of my mouth so I can apologize. While profanity can also be funny to many of us, it is easy to go overboard. While it can be amusing for its shock value, it can just as easily show a lack of respect for others since they may be offended. Again, when in doubt, leave it out.

Scientists say that adults laugh 10 to 15 times per day. Our children laugh 300 to 400 times a day. We have a lot to learn from our kids. Laughing in our businesses is a good way to start to catch up.