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If you've ever tried to run a group or teach a class, you know that when your audience laughs at you, you've lost them, but that if you can get them to laugh with you, you've got them. Humor can be a crucial way of meeting goals—or sabotaging them. Many seem to believe that humor is a glorious patch of hallowed ground where we all meet and laugh with equal joy. But men and women tend to have different opinions of what's funny. Even when we happen to laugh at the same time we are not all laughing at the same things.
The point here is not to ban certain jokes, but we do need to be sensitive to how they are used. Humor, after all, is marked by subjectivity; it is filtered by history, social class, race, and ethnicity. You wouldn't tell an Italian joke at a Sons of Italy meeting if you weren't Italian—so why is it that many in the workplace fail to understand that gender can also influence what someone takes to be funny?
A cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but a joke is never just a joke
Men, who decide what is universally applicable and empirically true, have declared that women do not have a sense of humor because women tend not to laugh at what men find funny: the Three Stooges, the flatulence scenes in Blazing Saddles, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Moreover, the "gags" directed at women have far too long served exactly that purpose: to shut women up. If a woman responds to a degrading remark by saying, "I don't think that's funny," the reply she'll often hear is, "What's the matter? Don't you have a sense of humor?" Such a response, author Joanna Russ explains, is tantamount to saying, "I find jokes about you funny. Why don't you find jokes about you funny?"
| Humor is an eye-opener, a way of making our feelings and responses available to others without terrifying our colleagues. |
| —Regina Barreca |
Women do laugh, however—with a vengeance. A joke is never just a joke. Humor is also about risk and privilege; it works by bending or breaking the rules. For women and other groups traditionally exiled from the centers of influence, comic play often has to do with the systematic misappropriation of power. Myriad sociological and anthropological studies conclude that women choose those above them in the hierarchy as targets of their humor—in other words, the pretentious boss rather than the clumsy mail clerk. Used in this manner, a joke can signal the transformation of speechless outrage into persuasive, vocal, and creative audacity.
Why has a feminine comic tradition remained essentially hidden from the mainstream? The "Tupperware mentality" encouraged earlier generations of working women to keep their sense of humor to themselves in order to avoid potentially hazardous male criticism. In the past 20 years, however, women have come to see not only that carefully cultivated risk taking is essential for success, but also that humor can be a great part of the process and reward of success.
The message in the bottle
When we can frame a difficult matter with humor—for example, pointing to the absurdity of a situation, or turning embarrassment or unease into something to be shared—we can often reach someone who would otherwise withdraw. Such humor requires both strength and vulnerability: You must be willing to make the first move, but you must also be able to trust your listener's response. Conversely, the most damaging kind of humor is cowardly and evasive. When a person habitually hides behind the old "Oh-I-was-just-kidding" screen, he or she is abdicating responsibility by pretending not to understand how language and emotion function. And abdication of responsibility is not, to put it mildly, a leadership trait.
Humor is an eye-opener, a way of making our feelings and responses available to others without terrifying our colleagues. It can accomplish what people used to look to alcohol for: channeling fear into pleasure, translating anxiety into courage, and getting at the truth of the matter. Instead of dismissing a subject—especially one unfit for public discussion—the best humor opens that subject up for opinion and rebuttal.
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