Why You Should Include a Joker in Every Brainstorming Session

Male humor is often competitive. Males see humor like football or war. We're out to score points, and if I'm successful, it's at your expense. This is why males engage in practical joking that causes inconvenience and sometimes suffering. Female humor tends to be more supportive. Even when it's focused on a stupid mistake, it doesn't put the other person down. Here's the ultimate example of a practical joke that females would never engage in. When we lived in Florida there was a utility company that had two guys out digging a trench. One guy finds a vine that's a couple of feet long. For a joke, he tosses it onto the head of the other guy and yells, "Snake!" The other guy dies of a heart attack.

Heh, heh. When you tell that story to an audience, the men probably laugh.

They do. Moe, Curly, and Larry all laugh. The women go, "Ooohhh!" If you're using humor with women and someone gets hurt, you can just write it off. They're not going to find it funny.

Are authoritarian leaders afraid of humor?

Authoritarian types initiate the humor but tend not to accept it from an underling. In a meeting, if you initiate humor you've got the table. Authoritarian bosses tend to be distrustful of humor because they don't want to give up their power.

If you're the boss and somebody puts you down, what do you do?

I don't have a formula, but if there's any way you can take it, take it. Willingness to expose yourself to criticism in a playful way just makes you look so much better and so much more human. People will feel a loyalty to that person that an authoritarian boss just cannot command.

Heard any good jokes lately?

I don't deal in jokes, which sounds weird for a humor specialist. My recommendation is always prefer a story over a joke -- especially a true story that happened to you. A joke is highly artificial. If you tell me a joke, I know it didn't happen to you, and I know you didn't make it up. It has nothing to do with you or me. Jokes are very special pieces of language and require incredible economy. The punch line has to be in exactly the right place and changing just a couple of words wrecks the joke. According to many estimates, fewer than 10 percent of people can tell a joke successfully.

So stick to sonnets.

Stick to sonnets. I've got to use that line.