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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: 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.