When should you laugh on the job?
Let's talk about how humor copes with all the workplace things
Hey, welcome to a work-culture newsletter that helps you do more than cope when work’s a lot.
“Laugh,” Wendell Berry once advised. “Laughter is immeasurable.” But are you laughing much at work these days? A lot of workplace journalism says you should be. But Stanford’s Eric Tsytsylin notes that we’re suffering a “laughter drought.”
If you feel skepticism about workplace humor, I get it. All too often corporate attempts to leverage humor for profitability just aren’t funny—not least in a time when “new puritanism” has made humor a very tricky project. Late-night comedians are finding plenty of material in Elon Musk’s project to treat the U.S. Government like a startup. But are these “efficiencies” making 2.3 million federal employees laugh?
Still, laughter’s immeasurable. Makes me think of that video of the guy who makes his baby laugh by ripping up a rejection letter from an employer.
Anyway, you may be right: in these un-funny times, it does seem funny-strange, not funny-haha, for this work-culture newsletter to recommend on-the-job humor. But I believe you and I can make a good mode/switch with laughter.
Let’s see how by discussing a trend, a study, a story, and a shift.
A Trend
We’ll start with a popular, but unreliable, source of workplace humor.
The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 was brainrot, a term the Oxfordians defined this way: “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” But brainrot’s still pretty huge in 2025.
When people watch a a lot of TikTok (at least until Saturday, April 5), they’re likely to feel some brainrot. It’s a condition that marketers and brand designers hope they can leverage by appealing to Gen Zed’s taste for the absurd.
What about the workplace? Could managers connect with their teams through brainrot humor? Maybe. But they’ll probably suffer diminishing returns on this Skibidi investment.
Silly and cynical humor can be a short-term coping mechanism. But you can psych out your brain only so long before it figures out what’s not actually that funny.
A Study
Brain science on humor could start in a better place, however, with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose book How Emotions Are Made shows how your brain’s always guessing what’s happening in your experience. “In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses.”
The good doctor, apparently, once went on a bad date—or at least a date with a guy she was pretty sure she didn’t like. But while they were chatting over coffee, she felt her stomach flip a little. She thought, Maybe I like this guy after all. When she got home, she discovered she had the flu. Her brain had guessed wrong.
That sort of thing happens all the time, including in moments when you laugh at something that happens at work and then wonder, immediately, “Why did I laugh at that? Why did I think that was funny?”
A Story
But humor’s not only about making sense of your own experience; it also helps you make sense of your coworkers’ experiences, too. And that’s where things get really tricky. In my latest book, Digital Overwhelm, I share an interviewee’s unfunny experience of professional breakdown during the pandemic:
Brittany Minnesma was hired remotely as a marketer and, at the time of our interview, was still doing her work remotely without ever having met her managers or coworkers in person. “I think that most of the breakdown that I've experienced so far is being remote and not having as easy access to my colleagues, my boss, not being able to get answers as quickly, especially if I'm just communicating via a platform like Teams or Slack,“ Brittany noted. “Everyone is on different schedules. Everyone is remote, mostly, and very spread out. So, it's hard to get answers sometimes.”
What I didn’t include in the book was what she said about trying to guess at her coworkers’ sense of humor onscreen. So, this week, I went back to my transcripts from 2022 and found this telling passage: “You think that someone might be humorous or saying something in jest, and then when we're actually having a meeting, where I'm seeing faces onscreen, you find out that, Oh no like they weren’t joking about that. They're dead serious right now.”
So far, this newsletter’s trend, study, and story have shown how humor can be risky at work—which leaves unanswered this week’s question: What might laughter be good for at work? That’s a question that brings us to a mode/switch worth making.
A Shift
The linguist Kenneth Burke used to say that we should laugh this week about what made us cry last week. He didn’t mean trivializing serious things. But he did mean loosening our death-grip on one fixed interpretation of our experience. Don’t get locked in, Burke might say. Be flexible in how you make sense of your life and work.
So, that’s my mode/switch for this week: laugh at what could otherwise make you cry.
What good will that do? For starters, it helps make your cognition more supple. It keeps you from locking in to one emotional state. And it frees to you to pursue your goals for your own flourishing and that of others.
So, when you get that email and your face reddens, your heart speeds up, and your lips start to quiver, you don’t have to resort to what our Mode/Switch Pod guest David Beckemeyer has called outrage overload. Instead, let laughter rename your situation. The great gift of laughter is that it doesn’t require you to say anything. But it’s message is audible all the same.
Laughter’s not always the best medicine, of course. Corporations like Google practice “laughter yoga” in which people exercise and giggle to build mental health. That sounds like a short-term solution. And for some people, the forced laughter can open yet another pathway into workplace sadness. Unless the technique fits into a larger strategy for workplace wellbeing, it’s likely to run out of laughing gas.
But even so, I recommend trying to laugh at what makes you mad or weepy.
Personal story: In my own marriage, few things have frustrated me more than my spouse’s habit of interrupting a perfectly good quarrel by laughing. But I have to admit the longterm wisdom of mirth. Even an untimely chuckle can get you un-stuck.
I don’t recommend laughing in your angry coworker’s face, of course. But when you yourself feel stuck in a story your brain is telling you, you might try using laughter to play what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls The Impossible Game:
You notice a sucky thing that’s just happened to you.
You notice that your brain’s starting to spin a very limiting story about how this job is an eternal pit of suckiness.
Instead of giving into that story, you decide—just for funsies—to do what feels impossible. That might mean opening your spreadsheet and tying down that list one more time. Or it might mean requesting a meeting with your supervisor. Or it might just mean returning to the committee table and the conversation you’ve come to dread. Whatever is, and however you feel, you just do the impossible.
But wait—where’s the laughter? Here’s my proposed addition to the game: It takes gumption to cross the gap between “I’m feeling terrible” and “I’m gonna do the impossible next task.” Gumption—or maybe laughter. Try snickering or even guffawing at the zaniness of the situation. That amusement may just provide what G. K. Chesterton called the “supreme strength” that “is shown in levity."
-craig
A Self-Assessment That’s Making Me Laugh
