Twelve years of examining humour in the New Zealand workplace does not make the researcher immune from practical jokes, as Dr Barbara Plester discovered.
Walking to her work space at a male-dominated engineering company where she was based during research for her PhD, Plester gingerly tested her chair. Someone had removed the screws; if Plester had sat in the chair, she would have been instantly deposited on the floor.
"Fortunately, someone had taken pity [she was limping from an ACL reconstruction at the time] and warned me it might happen; I never sat down without testing the chair first. I realised they were only treating me as they treated everyone - I saw a visitor come in not long after, they took the screws out of his chair and he was pranked...I felt dreadful."
She might have felt even worse had she ended up on the floor but the episode was a useful one in her quest to see how humour is used in the New Zealand working environment - and its effect.
She found humour in Kiwi workplaces has a dark side, but Plester is keen to avoid being labelled as a humourless crusader seeking to stamp out unproductive fun: "I love humour, always have - it was what got me started down this path. It had its genesis in a job I had where the boss had basically outlawed humour. The way he saw it, if you were laughing, you weren't focused on the task.
"I saw quickly that good people were leaving - I lasted only three months myself - but I thought it was highly interesting that such a boss had forbidden laughter but was wondering why he couldn't hang on to people."
At the time, she was returning to university to do her masters, then a PhD. Now a senior lecturer in Management and International Business at the University of Auckland Business School, Plester has just completed a book called The Complexity of Workplace Humour: Laughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of Humour.
She undertook fly-on-the-wall stints in a series of organisations, including law firms, engineering, financial and IT companies. The engineering company with the screw-less chair was an extreme example as there were only three women on the entire staff; male humour ran rampant - practical jokes, blue humour, toilet jokes, the works...
Plester had her computer screen savers sabotaged, her water bottle was covered with Vaseline. She never hid that she was researching humour in the workplace and says her workmates soon forgot about it, treating her like one of them.
"Men were louder and more obvious; they tend to perform their humour. Women are quieter about it; most of the obvious jokers in the workplace are men."
There were unofficial boundaries observed. Smaller and/or less formal companies had staff who knew each other well; humour could be more contentious and risqué. However, more formal environments, like law firms, tended to be more constrained.
The dark side emerged when people used humour to make a point: "In Kiwi workplaces, it's known as 'taking the piss'. Sometimes people do it deliberately, it takes the form of jocular abuse. It's very hard to kick against that because, if you do, you are told, 'I'm just taking the piss, don't get upset'.
"Sometimes it starts as a joke but gets personal - it moves into criticising a personal characteristic like body shape, race, ethnic origins, sexual things and the like. It's complex because the person on the end of it is also glad they are in the 'in' group, by being included in the banter."
"[Sigmund] Freud wrote a book about humour, in which he made the point we often say the unsayable through humour; our unconscious desires are sometimes expressed in a joke - and that's true in workplaces too."
Humour could also be a great leveller, as she saw when one manager won an industry award and returned to work after a night of celebration to find his cubicle completely wrapped in toilet paper. He burst out laughing and "could have invoked his authority but laughter brought everyone on to same level for a while and worked really well."
Humour can also go badly wrong. Plester instances the case of a company email which began with a mildly funny joke. It was passed round from person to person, each adding to the joke until it got a bit out of hand - and was sent outside the company. The inappropriate sentiments made it into the media and the company suffered some reputational damage.
"Humour and power also don't always go together," says Plester. The case of former Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority boss Roger Sutton, who resigned after a complaint following his joke to staff about holding "visible G-string Fridays", was a case in point. Sutton had a reputation outside CERA as a personable man - and not all who heard his joke were offended by it - but his resignation showed how power and humour could be poor partners.
"I also can't say I know for sure humour in the workplace adds to the bottom line, the ROI of humour," says Plester. "I can't say I know happiness and laughter leads to better performance and productivity; it's too complex for that.
"The furthest I can go is that sometimes people perceive that humour helps them relax and they work better when they can laugh - but I can't categorically state that is always the case."