After "attractive," few compliments are more universally welcomed than "funny." But being deemed hilarious or witty is more than just a personality trait that can win you more friends. If used successfully, humor also can boost your status at work, persuading others that you're both more confident and more competent than you may actually be, according to forthcoming research into the connection between status and humor.
"If you are brave enough to tell the joke that you want to tell, whether it succeeds or not, people ascribe confidence to you because they see you as efficacious" for taking such a risk with all the ways a joke can potentially fail, said Alison Wood Brooks, assistant professor at Harvard Business School and the paper's co-author. "To tell a successful joke does, in fact, take quite a lot of competence and not just general intelligence, but emotional intelligence, to figure out all those variables."
Humor is often viewed as superfluous or ancillary behavior and hasn't been thought of as something that affects relationships and hierarchy within organizations and in daily life.
In other words, don't be like Richmond.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Friday October 07 2016, @11:46AM
new fact
if used successfully, being funny brings you advantages.
warning> if A, then X causes (synonym of A) tautology, X irrelevant.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 07 2016, @12:44PM
It'll also get you laid.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Friday October 07 2016, @01:04PM
Lay lady lay,
Lay me an egg for breakfast.
Stay lady stay,
Cook me the egg for breakfast.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by q.kontinuum on Friday October 07 2016, @05:18PM
Being funny the wrong way also gets you laid sometimes. Off, for example.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday October 07 2016, @10:16PM
I don't think I am ready to plug into a motherboard.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @12:44PM
Literally the least funny first post possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @03:00PM
Apparently, you don't have to be funny. You just have to try.
If you are brave enough to tell the joke that you want to tell, whether it succeeds or not, people ascribe confidence to you because they see you as efficacious
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday October 07 2016, @12:59PM
This just in: People are morons. They also tend to see you as more competent if you possess any of a long list of other attributes:
- Greater height (relative to any given local norm)
- Lighter skin tone (relative to any given local norm)
- Lower visible fatty tissue (within a certain range)
- Speech patterns, pronunciation, etc.
- Displayed confidence level
- Gender
- Hair color
- Choice of footwear
- General attractiveness
- and so on.
Now we can add "joke making" to the list. Fabulous.
Unfortunately none of these attributes actually have much of anything to do with whether or not someone is competent at any particular task. The fact that we still find all these attributes important and make assumptions about peoples' character and abilities based on such superficial observations just reveals how much the human animal still relies too much on instinct above intellect and reason.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Friday October 07 2016, @01:12PM
It's ape behaviour. Nothing we can escape from completely.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Funny) by Nerdfest on Friday October 07 2016, @01:27PM
Bah, you all sound like a bunch of short, fat people, with no sense of humour.
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Friday October 07 2016, @01:28PM
You can tell all that just by reading this?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @02:45PM
Well, this is SN. Just sayin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @04:14PM
You just described the average USAian.
(Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Friday October 07 2016, @05:15PM
Now, there's no need to fling turds.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 07 2016, @01:17PM
Actually, one of the most important things on the list: facial and body symmetry. Those with symmetry are perceived as attractive leaders, those without are not.
What's interesting about all this is that in those rare instances where a person seen as asymmetric and thus unattractive manages to get into a leadership post, they are often better at it, largely because they had to compensate by getting spectacularly good at their job and leading others effectively in order to end up in charge of anything.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday October 07 2016, @04:38PM
"Symmetry" is also linked to perceptions of beauty, probably because it is also a visible signal of good health and good condition (both current and developmental).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @01:03PM
Boss: How was your weekend Ethanol?
Ethanol: Two niggers, a wop, and a Jew walk into a bar...
Boss: Shut up and go stock aisle 7 you jackass.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @01:51PM
Wait, I need to know the punch line before I mod you up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @03:46PM
... to go to work. Since they are bouncers at The Blue Oyster bar, they must remain serious and never cut up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @04:18PM
Wait, I need to know the punch line before I mod you up.
... walk into a bar... or so I'm told. I'd never be caught dead in the same pace as those kinds of people.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday October 07 2016, @05:34PM
Wait, I need to know the punch line before I mod you up.
It wasn't a joke, he was actually describing his weekend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @05:53PM
Ethanol: Two niggers, a wop, and a jew die and go to hell...
Boss: I don't wanna hear the punch line, get back to work.
Ethanol: That was the punchline.
(Score: 1) by webnut77 on Saturday October 08 2016, @03:48AM
... walk into a bar. They all four received concussions but the building is ok.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JeanCroix on Friday October 07 2016, @01:07PM
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday October 07 2016, @02:54PM
Actually, "+1 Funny" mods do count towards your karma on SoylentNews, but with just over 500 comments [soylentnews.org] you're gonna need about another 199,500 +5 comments to get there. ;)
Sadly, I just used my last mod point, otherwise I'd give your comment a "+1 Funny" just to help you on your way!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday October 08 2016, @03:04AM
It's impossible to ever have more than 50 points at any given time. If you're already at 50 and somebody mods you up, you're still at 50. If somebody mods you down, that does stick though. I'm not sure what the lower limit on that is, if it's zero or if there isn't one.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday October 09 2016, @04:44PM
There's code to cap the calculated Karma, but the underlying data for each of the comments still resides in the DB. It would be an interesting exercise to see what people's karma would be if there were no karma cap!
In case you were wondering why there is a cap, there were problems with folks who, having accumulated massive karma on the other site from which this site's code was forked, went on a griefing spree without concern for their karma. Their solution was to institute a karma cap, and we inherited that logic here.
I wonder if a Karma Cap looks anything like a fedora? ;)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by snufu on Friday October 07 2016, @06:11PM
Humor is often viewed as superfluous or ancillary behavior and hasn't been thought of as something that affects relationships
Humor is the first criteria when I am selecting and cultivating friendships.
Friends: humor
Family: commitment/compassion
Business relations: trustworthy
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday October 07 2016, @07:21PM
My colleagues frequently reject my suggestions for humourous or punny research paper titles. Apparently research papers are meant to be purely academic devices with a minimal amount of simple words that could potentially catch the eye of a stray observer.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Friday October 07 2016, @10:28PM
As I explained in my essay "Negative feedback patterns in post-Brzezikian models of frontal cortex activity", the title must be as incomprehensible as possible, so less eyes will give attention to the study, so the author is less likely to be bugged about it by one of his peers and can go on crunching out other papers.
Security through obscurity, done right.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 08 2016, @01:29AM
Humor works to a point.
That is right up until you meet/hire the 'stick in the mud'. Everyone is getting along. Inside jokes abound. Then this dude shows up. Everything must be serious, dead serious. Look dude it is a inventory program for a few people to use, not a critical life saving device. They swing by HR to make sure no fun is had anymore. "No one is being professional" "where I used to work no one was like that" ( there is a reason for that dude) "one of the xyz could hear it" They use every SJW button they can think of and a lot of HR people eat it up as they sit in horror they might get the company sued if nothing happens.
At that point humor turns to horror. You are afraid of what you can say and to whom. Say the wrong thing and you are visited by your boss and HR. Because someone overheard you. You get to keep your job 'this time' 'dont do it again'.
Everyone knows who did it and tiptoe around hoping he does not hear.
Work was once a fun place to hang out and bang out a cool project is now an exercise in appearances and it sucks. Top people start to leave. The once fun people hide hoping no one will pick on them.
Then for icing on the cake the hypocritical douche will take it as an opportunity to have his own style of humor be the approved one. His form of humor is usually to degrade specific people he sees as threats to his ego. That is until someone decides to retaliate. Then its HR visits for everyone.
So yeah humor can be good. But keep it light and watch your back.