It's been a tumultuous year and a lot needs fixing. Here is an odd question, can humour help?
There is a tradition in polite society that seriousness and humour should always be kept apart. Not only should they have nothing to do with one other but apparently humour can be positively detrimental to the sombre and serious process of leadership and consequential decision making. So goes so much of our lives.
I think that is just wrong. In fact, I think the opposite is true. Leadership positively requires a solid sense of humour and, further, consequential decisions made without one are bound to fail. Why? Because humour requires a somewhat diffident approach to life, an understanding that things go wrong, and most of all, a sense of fallibility.
There are graduations of course; there is a difference between being silly and being witty. But honestly, a politician who doesn’t have the ability to laugh, particularly at him-or-herself is a dangerous thing. A good example of this is Ronald Reagan. Reagan was not everyone's favourite politician but maybe that’s the point; he held a naturally losing hand and he turned it into a winning one - partly with humour.
Reagan was famous for telling jokes about Russia. One of his favourites was about an American and a Russian who were arguing about freedom. “The American says, ‘I can walk into the Oval Office, slam my fist on the president's desk, and say, "I don't like the way you're running this country.' The Russian replies, ‘I can do that too. I can walk into the Kremlin, slam my fist on the General Secretary's desk,and say, "I don't like the way Reagan is running his country.”
Think what the jokes were doing. During a tense era, they helped ease diplomatic relations while at the same time underlining his firm ideological position. He was able to underscore the stark difference between democratic capitalism and Soviet communism without sounding overly confrontational. And his humour made his criticism relatable and real and, by the way, also palatable for local and international audiences.
Obviously Reagan didn’t bring down half a century of Soviet communism with a few jokes. But it's possible that his affability both eased and hastened the process by leavening and spicing such a tense period in history with humour for people both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Is that pushing its utility too far? Possibly. But if residents of the Soviet Union thought of Reagan as a dedicated and absolute enemy, would they have dared make any changes at all?
There are other disciplines outside of politics where humour is very useful, take science and economics. A good example is Mar Roach’s explanation of the mechanics of digestion in her book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Roach marvels at the muscular coordination of swallowing, describing it as a "polite bouncer escorting guests down to the stomach." Stomach acid is a 'molecular machete' that breaks down food. The icky anus is the “'poop chute' and so on. It's all approachable and delightful.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, too, makes a subject as complex as stellar physics more understandable by finding its funny side. Talking about humanity’s small place in the universe, he once remarked, “We’re just a speck on a speck orbiting a speck in the middle of specklessness.”
On the subject of humour and physics, allow me to relate the world’s cleverest joke. Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are driving together in a car, when a cop pulls them over. The cop asks Heisenberg, "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg replies, “No, but I do know exactly where I am”. The cop says, “You were doing 100 in an 80 zone”. Heisenberg replies, "Great! Now we are lost!" The cop pops the boot and asks, “Do you know you have a dead cat in the back here?” Schrödinger replies, “Well, we do now”? The cop decides to arrest them but Ohm resists.
If it's possible to teach physics using humour, how much easier must it be to teach something simple like history using the same techniques. Is it really just a coincidence that Bill Bryson's fabulously funny book A Short History of Nearly Everything is the biggest-selling popular science book of the 21st century?
But back to humour and leadership. Stellenbosch economic professor Johan Fourie recently wrote in his blog Our Long Walk, about the facility - and dangers - of workplace humour in a piece called Why is your boss not funny? The article suggested that the reason is because the more diverse an audience, the more difficult it becomes to find a balance between what tests the bounds of acceptability and is also essentially well meaning.
Marketing gurus Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren call this the Benign Violation Theory, which explains why humour becomes harder the more diverse the audience. It's because what’s acceptable differs based on people’s personal experiences, cultural backgrounds, and social norms.
“While diversity enriches an organisation, it also broadens the spectrum of what might be considered offensive. A joke that one colleague finds funny might be interpreted differently by someone from a different sex, race, religion, or age group. This heterogeneity increases the potential cost in our economic model, leaving less room for experimentation,” Fourie suggests.
Leadership plays a pivotal role in this evolutionary process. When leaders model and encourage humour, they set a precedent that others are inclined to follow. This creates a positive feedback loop, embedding humour into the fabric of the organisation. Leaders perhaps need to recognise that fostering humour is not about being the funniest person in the room, but about creating an environment where humour can thrive naturally. By demonstrating openness to light-hearted moments, even in serious settings, they give employees permission to engage in humour without fear of negative consequences.
Another area where humour fosters a winning strategy is advertising. Nando's effectively built an international brand on the back of being funny and cheeky. Here is a selection of the best. It's not an accident that advertising - always trying to find ways to make the unmemorable memorable - uses humour so much.
Obviously, the process of life is serious. But that doesn’t mean we have to always take it seriously. In some ways, the very existence of humour is its own justification. We use humour in all kinds of situations; sometimes to make harsh things easier, sometimes to give ideas the power to penetrate, sometimes to simplify.
If nothing else, let's make 2025 a little more amusing than it might otherwise be. Who knows? It might reshape the world because sometimes behind a great joke is the truth waiting to ambush you.
From the department of going back in history ...
The Cape sea route is back, the NY Times reports
Quotable quote: "On average, 136 container ships a week have traveled around the Cape of Good Hope this year, compared with 40 before the Houthi attacks started," according to data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a shipping analytics company.
From the department of WTF is going on here ..
ICYMI: My Daily Maverick columns this week:
Tim Cohen
Tim Cohen
From the department of moderately good thinking batperson ..
The Magnificent 7 is dead! Long live the BATMMAAN stocks
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