Work may be a laughing matter

By SELWYN PARKER

Trying to be amusing, a job applicant wrote in a resume: "References? None. I've left a path of destruction behind me." He didn't get the job.

Another resume, presumably from a petrolhead, noted alongside the personal column: "Married, 1992 Chevrolet." This attempt at humour might have worked if the applicant wanted a job with General Motors but it doesn't go down well with a law firm.

And at a job interview, one applicant promised he would demonstrate his loyalty to the new company by having the corporate logo tattooed on his forearm. (The prospective employer was probably Harley-Davidson.)

Most employment consultants would regard these real-life attempts at wit as professional suicide, but there's a growing school of thought that says they might be on the right track. If you can't laugh about something you do eight hours a day or more, then you're spending a third of your life without so much as cracking a grin.

Humour at work has only recently become a subject considered worthy of study. As far as I know, there's absolutely no material available on the subject in New Zealand but they're on to it overseas. And the growing view is that good managers should come armed with a sense of humour as well as an MBA, and with an ability to recognise humour in staff.

Staff who laugh could even get a bonus. Pay a premium for humour, suggests Auckland executive recruiter Heather Keane, only half-joking.

Whether companies are willing to pay more for it or not, we apparently need more humour in the workplace.

Canadian Louise leBrun, author of Fully Alive from 9 to 5!, notes with regret: "Humour is the missing link in the chain of command."

She wants managers to: "Lighten up! Today's effective executives/managers/supervisors are the ones who recognise that they are facilitators, not controllers."

Some people have been saying this for a long time. In 1964, English writer Arthur Koestler wrote that humour helps facilitate a reinterpretation of a given situation or event. This can be taken to mean that, with the aid of humour, work doesn't seem like work.

More recently, Australian researchers have concluded that in highly stressed jobs humour is probably essential. The authors of an interesting (but humourless) study by Carmen Moran and Margaret Massam of the University of New South Wales' School of Social Work found that police, firemen, paramedics, warders in maximum security prisons and psychiatric nurses apparently fall back on humour a lot.

Sometimes this humour is of the black or gallows variety. Australian firemen, for example, lighten the load by referring to a severely burned person as a crispy critter and police describe a long-dead, decomposing unfortunate as a greenie. This may sound sick to anybody who isn't in police work, but it serves its purpose at the time.

Humour is good in universities too, according to a study in the American Journal of Sociology by J.C.Overholser. He found that students who consciously sought out opportunities for laughter were less depressed, less lonely and reported higher levels of self-esteem.

If nothing else, this shows that Craccum's article, "Suicide and how to do it," completely misses the point.

Perhaps Craccum should have dug a bit deeper.

Another researcher on this elusive subject, geriatrician H.A. Johnson, suggests using jokes when dealing with such inherently grim subjects as ageing, death, dying, grieving and suicide. "Hey! Hear the one about the 80-year-old who fell out of a 10th-floor window, killed a baby in a pram, was so shocked he committed suicide, and his friend had a heart attack giving the eulogy."

There is, however, a time to be serious. People who think they're being funny but aren't can end up increasing stress levels in their colleagues. This is rather mystifyingly called the Uncle Joe syndrome.

And it's all too easy to analyse humour to death. An American study, "Humor in the Briefing Room," classified police humour into four types - jocular aggression, audience degradation, diffusion of danger or tragedy and something called normative neutralisation.

The actual process of laughter has been analysed so much it's not even funny. The physiological explanation is that a laugh is a sign of life that emerges from a movement of information and energy through the body; a transfer of information and intelligence through biochemical and electrochemical impulses.

But there's no doubt about the benefits of humour. Laughter produces identifiable physical effects that appear similar to those of exercise, including muscle tension, heart rate and respiration rate, all of which are followed by a rebound reduction or relaxation effect, say the Australian researchers.

This means that most people enjoy a laugh, and if they laugh all day it's probably the equivalent of running a marathon.

But, seriously, the implications for managers of an all-round increase in rebound reductions are considerable. The research shows that humour enhances creativity, problem-solving and memory. And these are qualities that are clearly worth hiring.

Most managers should be able to tell whether the applicant has a creative, problem-solving and memory-enhancing penchant for humour or is just a berk.

If, to quote another real-life example, the applicant asks his interviewer "why aren't you in a more interesting business?" it's fairly obvious you wouldn't want him on the payroll.

And if the applicant falls over and breaks an arm during the interview (as happened), that might just indicate he or she is too nervous to be funny and should be hired on the grounds of compassion.

But if your prospective employee asks "what are the zodiac signs of all the board members?" you had better check whether he's joking before you throw him out the door.

Your company may need that sort of creativity.

* Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz