Work and life frequently get tough. What can you do but laugh about it? Will acting solemn make things any better? No it won’t. The world is objectively screwed up in so many levels that all we have in our hands as our main weapon to shield us from the lemons life throws at us is a good dose of levity. There is this joke I like of a passer-by who finds a man laying down in the street with a knife buried deep on his back, bleeding profusely. The passer-by asks:
— Does it hurt?
To what the wounded man replies:
— Only when I laugh
We might be, from time to time, the person on the ground in that story. Things may, and will, get somber.
See submarines.
Few environments are tougher than a submarine. You may be surprised how much these military machines run on “soft” leadership skills, like humor. In submarines, teams are small and constrained, living in uncomfortable quarters for long times. To make it easier for the crew, there is no substitute for cheerfulness and some good spirited banter. In fact, naval training is predicated on the notion that when two groups with equal resources attempt the same thing, the successful group will be the one whose leaders better understand how to use the softer skills to maintain morale and motivation. No one wants to follow a pessimist when things are looking ugly out there, or deep down.
On 7 July 2002, HMS Nottingham, a submarine of the Royal Navy, ran aground on the submerged but well-charted Wolf Rock near Lord Howe Island, 600 km off the coast of Australia causing millions worth of damage. A 49 m hole was torn down the side of the vessel from bow to bridge, flooding five of her compartments and nearly causing her to sink, triggering the largest and most dangerous flooding incident in recent years. The Royal Navy’s board of inquiry found that “morale remained high” throughout demanding hours of damage control and that “teams were cheerful and enthusiastic”, focusing on their tasks; sailors commented that the presence, leadership, and good humor of senior officers gave reassurance and confidence that the ship would survive1. As great comedians as they were, some of those senior officers were martialed because the reason the ship ran aground was a junior officer, while plotting a route on the ship's map, inadvertently placed a navigational instrument on top of a location, hiding the rocks2. Comedy cannot replace competence. Put a comedian to fly a Boeing 747 and you will laugh all your way down to a horrible death3.
There is a fine line between dosing life with a good amount of humor and being annoying, or plainly tone deaf. Empty optimism or false cheer can also hurt morale. If you choose to always be uber-optimistic and funny, then the effect, over time, is reduced. I had this boss (or boss of my bosses) who was so vapidly cheerful that he sounded like a televangelist. All his motivational, “funny” speeches were cringeworthy. In comedy, timing and genuinity are king.
Work is an endless source of nonsense. Nonsense that you can perceive as overly funny if you scrutinize it from the right angle. Work has made me face the most ridiculous situations at work.
See this one.
The owner of a company I was working for many years ago was quite fond of avoiding taxes. This meant keeping a big portion of the company’s personnel in total legal “darkness”, that is, employed but not registered anywhere: no pension, no healthcare, no nothing. When it was time to pay salaries every month, he would call you to his office and he would hand you cash, bill by bill. It was a bizarre situation because you would still feel you had to thank the guy (saying nothing felt awkward). I do understand when I tell this story to Europeans or Americans and they recoil in disbelief, but in South America, it is sadly quite common4. Anyway, the bizarre stuff is not that, there is even more.
This owner was pretty good at bribing the inspectors from the Employment Office, so he would always keep them far away. Once, for reasons unknown (we suspect an anonymous whistleblower, or he forgot to pay the “fees” in time), inspectors showed up unannounced, and the guy freaked out. So he came to the factory floor (where we used to work) visibly unhinged and started asking people to hide in different places. This included closets, I swear to God. And to others, like yours truly, he asked to act like painters. So, he handed a few brushes around, a few cans of paint, and he was like “now, go paint”.
And there we were, me and my workmates from the R&D department, painting, or pretending to. The most nerdy-looking painters humankind has ever known; I even had my Casio FX-82 in my shirt pocket.
Mind I am not romanticizing employment informality, but why not laugh about it? I was laughing hysterically, yet silently, as the inspectors were roaming around, thinking of all the times my dad tried to make me paint something at home and failed miserably, only to end up “painting” for a bunch of bureaucrats from the Employment Office. That I didn't see coming.
On another occasion, I was working for some other company and a potential customer was coming for a meeting. Customer’s had sent a technical guy who wanted to get more technical details about the product he was considering buying. While I was waiting for this meeting, I was at my desk doing some other stuff and chewing a ball pen I had. Turns out, the ball pen’s case and tank had broken with my chewing activity and the blue ink had started to pour out of it. Without me noticing anything, the ink had gone to my face—extensively—making me look like a work-in-progress smurf on a budget.
Anyway, meeting time was up, and off I went to meet with this person, with my face covered in blue. I do remember the guy being a bit uncomfortable, and somewhat hesitant during the meeting as I was showing him some slides. I thought it was the product just being unfit for his needs. I only noticed the ink on my face several hours later. Unsurprisingly, the business did not happen.
Edit: adding another one that I just remembered. In the same company I “painted” for, there was this woman who was in charge of the SMT manufacturing line who would call the machines by female names she had given and would always refer to the machines as if they were her kids or pets. Because I had to program the machines and therefore needed to get close to them, I would always have her vigilant eyes on my back while I was doing the work, as she was very protective of her “kids”. I attribute her eccentric behavior to the constant inhaling of heavy-metal-rich fumes out of one of her girls; a 5kW reflow oven.
I have more bizarre stories which I cannot fully disclose because some of them start to be of questionable taste, like that one involving a toilet out of order which was clearly indicated with a huge sign that I did not see, only to end up literally hiding under a desk while the cleaner was hunting for the wrongdoer.
Humor helps us move forward. It helps untie us from the shaming spirals we might get ourselves into every now and then. Humor breaks the ice, and can help to close emotional wounds faster. Shit happens and will continue happening, so better have a good laugh about it. It won’t solve anything, but it will release the right endorphins and get you high enough to see things as if you licked a Colorado River toad.
But you must do it responsibly, both humor and toad-licking: the line between funny and unfunny can be thin, and hard to see.
It is quite surprising that airplane cabin intercoms are not more frequently used for comedic purposes, taking into account you have a nice, captive audience who has no other choice than listening to you. I remember one flight attendant from Lufthansa using it for some good dry wit that we all passengers enjoyed.
As of 2022, 35% of all workforce in Argentina is unregistered