p.190
Humor and the reproduction of exclusionary workplace cultures
Danielle J. Deveau and Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa
Introduction
Humor has great potential as an untapped business resource; however, we are here concerned with the ways in which enthusiasm about the value of humor in social relations may mask the extent to which jokes, pranks, gags, and laughs can also instantiate negative effects in the social relationships that constitute the work environment. As scholars Penelope Brunner and Melinda Costello argue in relation to women in leadership positions, “sexual humor may be used, consciously or unconsciously, to undermine control.”1 They find that in these instances sexual humor is used not only to undermine female authority in the workplace, but also to preserve problematic organizational structures that are implicitly hostile to women’s participation in certain industry sectors. While there are many ways that humor can serve a positive organizational role, it must also be acknowledged that social inequalities and prejudices which feed discriminatory practices can be reinforced by humorous exchange. Positive appraisals of the social role of humor too often overlook some of the negative consequences of joking. Not all humor is in good fun. When used against outsiders or minority groups in the workplace, it can result in discomfort, unwelcoming work environments, social exclusion, the exclusion of newcomers, and the reinforcement of inequalities within organizations.
It remains, however, that regulating such humor poses a challenge. Why is this the case? According to humor scholar Michael Billig, there is a persistent emphasis on the positive social effects of humor, rooted in an ideological aversion to negativity. He writes that a
pattern of accentuating positives and eliminating negatives can be seen in the contemporary psychology of humour, no matter whether this is the psychology of popular writers, academics or professional psychotherapists. The negatives of ridicule, sarcasm and mockery seem to be eliminated in a view that positively praises the warm-heartedness of humor.2
This persistent emphasis on the positive effects of humor, such as enhancing social bonds, can be explained by the nature of humor itself. Sharing a sense of humor is incredibly important for thick social relations: for instance, we know that a shared sense of humor ranks highly in spousal selection.3 What we find funny is particularly enduring. Humor is also remarkably culturally specific, and one of the most difficult things to understand or translate inter-culturally.4 Our social networks therefore tend to reinforce our own sense of humor rather than refine it. As such, our experiences of humor can be very affirming for our identity and sense of belonging.
p.191
Yet is laughter always positive? Surely not when you are the butt of a cruel joke. Does humor always bring people together? Not if you are on the outside looking in. We all remember times when our attempts at humor went wrong or when we were hurt by the jokes of another. While sharing a sense of humor with a hiring committee or supervisor can open up career doors and strengthen professional networks, making the wrong joke at the wrong time can result in social ostracization. In other words, humor not only reinforces social bonds between ‘in-groups,’ but it also reinforces the social exclusion of ‘out-groups.’
With this insight in mind and in the scope of this textbook’s consideration of humor in business and society relationships, this chapter steps outside of the context of humor as a positive social force or as a tool for business management. Positive functions of humor are important to understand, but so too are the negative aspects of workplace humor that we address here. We argue that positive aspects of humor cannot be considered in isolation; the problematic social functions of humor and laughter such as exclusion, ridicule, and harassment must also be addressed. Such uses of humor can of course be seen in a range of other types of harassment, including bullying, and discrimination based upon race, class, ability, and sexual orientation. While in this chapter we focus on sexual harassment, many of the issues that we raise are relevant to any number of other forms of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. These issues offer important clues as to the persistence of systemic inequalities in the workplace: as Brunner and Costello argue, “while societal norms and discrimination laws target the obvious discrimination practices in organizations, subtle methods of prejudice, such as sexual humor, retain and support an organization’s historical structure and are often overlooked.”5
To illustrate this issue, we consider three case studies drawn from Canadian media and public discussions about workplace humor and harassment in 2016. The first is a video that was circulated at Simon Fraser University to promote “Sweater Day,” an initiative whereby students and faculty are encouraged to don sweaters and lower their thermostats as a gesture towards environmental consciousness. In the video, a female faculty member is complimented on her physical appearance by a male undergraduate student and responds with girlish giggles. The video received significant backlash and resulted in backpedaling and a formal apology from the administration. The second case study considers the media and public response to a female firefighter’s complaints about a pornographic video played during a training course as a ‘joke.’ The third case study is a discussion of the fallout from the External Review into Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Harassment in the Canadian Armed Forces, released in 2015, which found that humor was used to reinforce a problematic sexualized work environment, enabling other forms of more significant harassment.
Combined, these examples serve to reinforce our argument that workplace humor can produce a toxic workplace culture. Specifically, in this chapter, we argue three points: (1) humor reinforces social hierarchies; (2) humor is intimately related to gender harassment in the workplace; and (3) humor can contribute to a hostile environment within workplace culture. The theoretical underpinnings of this chapter are grounded in the perspective that the use of humor in the workplace both constructs social bonds and enacts power. We draw upon sociological discussions of humor, as well as organizational communication and discourse analyses of humor in the workplace. We suggest that business managers and leaders who are attempting to promote jovial workplaces must also equally focus on promoting social inclusion through other means, and remain cognizant of the ways in which joking can serve to reinforce problematic and exclusionary structures of power in the workplace.
p.192
Humor as an ambivalent social gesture
Although humor is a distinctly shared and social experience, it is the ‘subjective’ aspect of a ‘sense of humor’ that tends to be emphasized in critical discussions and cautionary tales of humor in the workplace. The reality is that not all people share the same sense of humor, and what is considered funny to one person, might be considered not funny—or worse, offensive—to another. Some analyses overemphasize the extent to which the offensiveness of humor is merely subjective; indeed, studies have shown, for example, that men and women are equally adept at perceiving sexist jokes as offensive, and do not differ as much in interpretation as often thought.6 However, it is true that humor, like all discourses, is open to interpretation. Likewise, its interpretation cannot always be predicted. This renders humor an ambivalent social gesture.
Indeed, even the scholarship of humor cannot necessarily produce consistent readings of humorous texts. For example, in an introductory excerpt from his essay “Performing Media: Toward an Ethnography of Intertextuality,” Mark Allen Peterson offers an anecdote to illustrate his observation that humorous references to mass culture provide vital means of producing social bonds. Peterson provides an analysis of a humorous exchange that differs significantly from our own interpretation of the scenario. In the anecdote, a group of male spectators (Peterson among them) are watching their daughters’ softball practice:
The scene is a baseball field in Midwestern Pennsylvania. The first practice for the Teal Tigers Girls’ Softball Team has just ended. The coach is playing a game with the girls to test their knowledge of baseball rules, asking them questions and tossing them candies when they answer correctly. The parents, mostly fathers, stand awkwardly in a circle watching. We are waiting to collect our daughters and take them home. We do not know one another yet.
The coach runs out of questions. She still has two girls who have not earned a candy and she does not want them to go home empty handed. She looks up at the parents, hopefully. “Can anybody think of another question?”
“Who’s on first?” says one of the fathers. Several of us grin.
“What’s on second?” asks another.
“I don’t know,” says the first man.
“Third base!” I offer. Two other men say it simultaneously with me. We are all grinning at each other now. The ice has been broken. We still do not know one another, yet some kind of connection has been made. The coach rolls her eyes. Our children gaze at us in perplexity.7
With this anecdote, Peterson intended merely to illustrate the way in which reference humor is used to form social bonds. In this case, the reference is to a Vaudeville routine, popularized by Abbott and Costello in the 1930s, in which Costello attempts to learn the names of the basemen, only to be frustrated by the exchange as each of the players has an unusual name which produces confusion (the players are named ‘Who,’ ‘What’ and ‘I don’t know’). However, this excerpt does much more than illustrate the use of humor to create social bonds in everyday life. Reading a little deeper into the description, it is evident that Peterson’s anecdote is heavily gendered. The male spectators enjoy a joke, while the female coach responds humorlessly, perhaps even with passive annoyance. In fairness to Peterson, it is entirely coincidental that the coach happened to be a woman, and that a majority of parents present at that particular practice happened to be men. However, Peterson is very careful in his description of the scenario, noting that it is a girls’ softball team, that the coach is in fact female, and that the majority of parent spectators are male; such specificity would suggest that gender must have something to do with it. Furthermore, as Karim H. Karim has argued, “humor is an essential part of social bonding, and those who are left out of the circle of laughter also find themselves excluded from the vital occasions for societal participation.”8
p.193
The softball dads did not simply use humor to produce a social bond. They used humor to produce a social bond by creating an in-group who participated in the joke, and two distinct out-groups who did not. Their group was constituted as much by exclusion as it was by inclusion. The separation between the coach and the fathers is made more notable because she had asked them for help. She attempted to construct a different group, one in which the fathers participated in the coaching of the team by coming up with other questions for their daughters. If mere cultural knowledge were the main factor in forming a social bond, the fathers could have exchanged their softball knowledge including regulations, statistics, and beer-league triumphs. Instead, the fathers rejected the coach’s group invitation, using humor to enter into an alternative group formation. The daughters are also excluded, being too young to understand the joke. While the coach may well have understood the reference, in the given context she does not choose to participate in the shared performance of referential humor. Indeed, it is unlikely that she was an intended participant to begin with.
However, even as it creates exclusion, humor has a knack for extending beyond its intended context. In this instance, the joke (and its retelling) includes a social meaning through the production of a relationship between the fathers, a cultural meaning through the use of shared references and signifiers, and a political meaning through the (in this case, gendered) production of an exclusionary group. Peterson did not offer his anecdote as a critical discourse on the exclusionary consequences of joking, and yet from our perspective this is precisely what this anecdote has done. Humor does not only produce social groups, but it produces groups with specific common interests. In the case of the softball dads, this commonality was based in gender, age, and a collective boredom with softball spectatorship. In all likelihood the participants did not intend to use humor in an exclusionary manner, nor did they intend to constitute such a relatively homogenous group. It simply occurred, seemingly on its own, seemingly naturally, as if it were an inevitable social progression.
Indeed, the supposed ‘naturalness’ of humor is a key element of its efficacy. What is funny must be obvious to the insiders, and cannot easily be explained to those who don’t get the joke. As Simon Critchley notes, “a theory of humour is not humorous. A joke explained is a joke misunderstood.”9 This renders critical analyses of humor suspect. To engage with a debate about the merits of a humorous utterance can mark you as humorless. Getting the joke means getting it intrinsically. The ability to disguise itself as ‘natural’ is one of humor’s greatest subversive powers. This is also how it can work as a tool of oppression or discrimination. The rhetorical power of humor is in its ability to disguise its socio-cultural origins. The humor of the joke teller is disguised as natural; this is an exercise of power, as the joke teller always has recourse to the claim that they were only joking. This is why we cannot rely on the ‘intention’ of the joker when deciding whether to absolve them of any offense they may cause. The more forceful accusation, you don’t have a sense of humor, when the joke fails or causes offense is also particularly effective because we live in a society that values humor. A sense of humor is a vital human quality, and not having one is an undesirable personality trait.10 Indeed, it is this privileged position of humor that gives it much of its rhetorical sway. As Michael Mulkay has suggested, the serious mode and the humorous mode are two distinct forms of discourse which operate according to different discursive rules.11 However, humor can be used to great effect to put forward serious messages, disguised behind the non-serious language of joking. The claim that one was only joking in the context of a workplace environment where harassment has been perceived must be considered in relation to what the serious interpretation of, for example, a sexist joke might be. As Brunner and Costello argue, humor and similar utterances are “subtle methods of prejudice” which “retain and support an organization’s historical structure.”12
p.194
In the workplace, humor can play a significant role in the maintenance of social hierarchies. For example, in an ethnography of workplace communication conducted at a hospital in the late 1950s, Rose Laub Coser found that the use of humor, or witticisms, in formal staff meetings correlated strongly with relative status. That is, those in positions of authority (senior staff members) were more likely to make jokes than those who occupied lower positions (such as junior staff members and paramedical staff such as social workers). Notably, in observations made outside of the context of the formal meeting, junior staff and paramedical workers proved to be adept joke tellers, but within the context of formal meetings humor use was always hierarchically distributed. This distinction also fell along gender lines, with female participants seldom making jokes during meetings; these individuals instead expressed a sense of humor by laughing heartily at the witticisms of their senior male colleagues. When junior staff members did make jokes, they were never at the expense of senior staff present, whereas the senior staff regularly made jokes at the expense of the junior staff members. Coser found very clearly, then, that “in a hierarchical social structure [tensions] seem to be released downward” and that this process reinforces the existing status structure.13
This reinforcement of status is a characteristic of social joking. As Coser notes,
humor and wit always contain some aggression, whether or not it is directed against a manifest target. The mere fact of taking the initiative to invite the group to withdraw their focal attention from the topic under discussion constitutes a daring act.14
This is a characteristic of humor even when it is not offensive or harassing. The act of exercising power as the joke teller engages with, and is rooted in, existing power dynamics. Joking is never neutral. As Hemmasi, Graf and Russ find in their analysis of gender-related workplace humor,
It is expected that subordinates and newcomers to an organization are more likely to refrain from joke telling, and when they do engage in such activities tend to mitigate the threatening nature of their act by making the content of the joke non-threatening (e.g., making themselves the object of a deprecating joke).15
Notably, the authors did not find significant differences between men and women in terms of their tolerance for sexual jokes. However, it is worth pointing out that humor in the workplace infrequently takes the form of formal joke telling. More subtle uses of humor, such as more direct teasing that could be construed as in good fun (or a normal part of workplace culture) or as bullying and harassment (or an aspect of producing a hostile work environment), are more likely to be experienced by workers regularly, and have a greater likelihood to be potentially problematic depending upon the social context in which the humor takes place. In this sense, the use of humor in the workplace correlates with Edgar Schein’s theory of “group evolution” in organizations, where workers navigate positions of authority and subordination, gradually building group conformity through increased cohesion and emotional commitment to the preservation of harmony within the group overall.16 In this process, outsiders who hope to gain access to the group may need to strategically (though often unconsciously) minimize their difference. In our examples of sexual humor and harassment, this would entail women having to ‘choose’ to find the harassing humor funny, rather than offensive.
p.195
The challenge with policing humor in the workplace is that it serves many diverse and important social functions. As Holmes and Stubbe find in their analysis of workplace communication, humor creates solidarity and reinforces a sense of belonging within groups; it also maintains and constructs power relationships; and it can be used as a hedging device to soften directives as well as a means of enacting politeness or “doing collegiality.”17 As Holmes and Stubbe suggest about understanding power negotiations in speech acts more generally,
Relative power needs to be assessed not only in the particular social context in which an interaction takes places, but more particularly in the specific discourse context of any contribution. [. . .] [T]he particular topic of discussion may be relevant in identifying where power or authority lies in a particular section of talk, as well as how it is enacted.18
This presents something of a challenge to any workplace with an interest in regulating speech acts. In the highly regimented workplaces that we consider in two of our case studies, a fire department and the military, power is enacted in very explicit ways, and individuals are socialized to accept and in turn enact power (and behavioral norms) down the chain of command. This serves to define (and regulate) appropriate and inappropriate discursive power plays in complex ways, with humor offering a sometimes ambiguous means of enforcing hierarchy (through for example, teasing) and group cohesion (through a shared sense of humor). It can also be used subversively amongst in-groups to deflect frustrations amongst the rank and file, or regulate participation and behavior. These uses of humorous speech acts are neither fundamentally positive nor negative; their relative power is context specific.
The power dynamics inherent in humor make its use within the work environment potentially fraught. In practical terms, the reinforcement of hierarchy through humor entails subordinates feeling obligated to find their supervisors’ jokes funny, or laughing at humor that might be experienced as harassment. When fitting into workplace culture involves sharing a sense of humor, those in subordinate positions are at a disadvantage as they have a disproportionate obligation to be receptive to the humor of others, while having limited space to define the terms of humorous discourse through their own joking. When joking is experienced as harassment, these power dynamics are further exacerbated.
Case study one: Sweater Day at Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, was recently the locus of a significant controversy over a video posted to its Facilities Management social media accounts that, by all appearances, was meant to promote SFU “Sweater Day.” This event encourages students, faculty, and staff to wear a sweater so that building temperatures may be turned down in an effort to promote energy saving on campus. The video features Mrs. (not Dr.) Pinkham, donning a pink sweater and playing solitaire on her computer just as a young male student walks by. His sexually suggestive compliments are received with flattery by Mrs. Pinkham. Fairly quickly after the video was posted, there was significant backlash from students, staff, faculty and the public, promptly followed by institutional backpedaling and an apology.
p.196
Elise Chenier, professor at the university, wrote a blog post detailing her concerns about the video and what it signifies about institutional culture:
When the very place you work promotes the kind of sexism that your intellectual work seeks to contest and ultimately, destroy, you feel like you are being eaten from the inside out. There was once a time when I would have seen the video as simply outdated, idiotic, and yes, offensive, but now I see it much differently. Now I feel the harm it does.19
In manifestations of institutional sexism (or racism, ableism, etc.), the intent behind an utterance or gesture doesn’t matter so much as entrenched policies or practices that result in injury or exclusion of certain groups. Individual senses of humor, laughing, offense, or non-offense do not reflect on the extent to which something is, in fact, sexist. It is obvious that the video was a gaffe and huge mistake, so its semiotics need not be discussed here—even as comments such as the following appear on articles related to the gaffe, which shows the degree to which sexism masked with humor is an ongoing problem:
Raise your hand if you have a sense of humor. If you like compliments. If you think people who overreact to silly videos have nothing better to do in their lives. My hand is in the air.20
Notwithstanding the major problematic of this view, what is more relevant to consider here is the chain of command that contracted the video, and the chain of approval that enabled it to be posted on official university social media accounts. Clearly, numerous people had to have been involved in the production and dissemination. This video and its sharing by university personnel is not merely an example of ‘getting it wrong’ in ‘good fun’ with regards to what people find funny. Rather, it reflects a systemic issue with the use of humor in the workplace to promote what, indeed, is something positive. That positivity is at the expense of women. We need to look more closely at the ways in which such lines of joking are reflected in common workplace disparities. For example, we know that female professors are consistently ranked below male counterparts in student and peer evaluations, which are often very gendered, including comments on appearance and physical attractiveness. The authors of this chapter have both received such comments in student evaluations of our teaching. Likewise, women are consistently paid less, are not seen in representative numbers in administration or dean positions, are promoted more slowly, and so on.
The kind of cheeky humor that the SFU video intended to emulate is widespread in popular culture. Indeed, as Beth Montemurro has found, sexual harassment is regularly used as comic fodder in popular television comedies. In an analysis of five workplace-based situation comedies, Montemurro found that, “although sexual harassment is rarely discussed in situation comedies, gender harassment is frequently used as ‘material,’ which leads to further trivialization of a serious problem.”21 The use of gender harassment as friendly banter in situation comedies further clouds general understandings of what ‘counts’ as harassment, and normalizes sexual humor in the workplace. A current example of this kind of banter can be seen in the popular program Brooklyn 99 (Dan Goor and Michael Schur, 2014–). A recurring gag in the series involves fictional New York detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) lampooning fellow detective Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero); whenever Santiago says something banal and self-critical such as “I’m sorry about tonight,” Peralta follows up with a line such as, “‘I’m sorry about tonight’ is the name of your sex tape.” This ‘sex-tape’ gag is part of a flirtatious repartee between the two characters that eventually evolves into an on-screen relationship.
p.197
It is notable that this kind of low-level sexualized joking is normalized, especially as the program is a police sitcom—and policing is precisely the kind of male-dominated workplace where this kind of harassment is likely to reinforce a hostile work environment. No doubt viewers are not intended to interpret the sexual banter as harassment. Indeed, the Brooklyn 99 work environment is ethnically diverse and includes strong female leads. The precinct police captain is African-American and gay, and there is no indication that any of the characters are overtly discriminated against. The only detectives who are regularly portrayed as incompetent are a couple of middle-aged white male detectives who are meant to represent the ‘old guard’ whose time has passed. All this is to say that within the scope of the program, the female detective who is the butt of sexual humor is portrayed as competent and respected by her peers. The harassment is intended to be interpreted as just a joke, and she does not appear to take it personally. It is precisely this sort of popular portrayal of sexual humor in the workplace that contributes to the normalization of this kind of banter. In everyday culture, we receive mixed signals about what constitutes appropriate workplace joking; at the same time that workplaces seek to avoid sexual harassment controversies which might result in public backlash and costly litigation, our popular culture presents representations of workplace relationships that are “rife with sexual innuendo and power trips.”22
As we can see from the SFU Sweater Day example, this normalization can have very problematic consequences when this kind of humor is taken up in real workplaces. This is especially evident when sexualization of the work environment crosses the line into intimidation, bullying and harassment, as is the issue in the next case study that we consider.
Case study two: pornography in the firefighter classroom
In January of 2016, firefighting instructor Jeremy Hall of Newfoundland’s Bay de Grave regional fire department came under media scrutiny for revelations that he had shown a pornographic video during a two-day vehicle-extrication training course in April 2014. The video in question involves a woman masturbating in a kitchen. Brenda Seymour, a Spaniard’s Bay City councilor and volunteer firefighter, brought forward allegations of sexual harassment, citing the use of pornography in the course as a manifestation of a general culture of harassment that she has endured as the only female in the brigade.
When asked about his use of the video, Hall admitted that he has used it a number of times, but downplayed its significance, claiming that the video was only played as a joke, that no harassment was intended, and that his practices of warning participants about the X-rated nature of the video and offering the option of leaving the room were sufficient to mitigate any feelings of discomfort.23
p.198
In the aftermath, the Spaniard’s Bay City council considered the removal of then-Fire Chief Victor Hiscock for his perceived failure of leadership stemming from ongoing accusations of rampant sexual harassment within the department. Although the motion for his dismissal was narrowly defeated, Hiscock resigned anyway along with 19 other firefighters who quit in a show of solidarity. The mayor, Tony Menchion, claimed that the incident was in no way a “gender issue,” and an article published in Vice Magazine found that women in Spaniard’s Bay were particularly publicly critical of Seymour for bringing forward her complaints, with one resident suggesting, “if [Seymour]’s going to be in a room of men, she has to be able to take the heat and take a joke.”24 In media discussions, public supporters of the Fire Department and its male volunteers were critical of Seymour, suggesting that her own interpersonal challenges and difficult relationship with the fire chief were the real reason for her complaints, and that the “gender issue” was simply a scapegoat.25
What is important to note here is that the issue of whether Seymour is a good colleague and the debate around what behaviors do and do not cross the line are moot. The use of pornographic material in a workplace or training environment results in the sexualization of the workplace. This inappropriate action is rendered even more problematic when the workplace in question has such a disproportionately low number of women; that is to say, the workplace is already structurally gendered, and the pornographic video intensifies and reinforces this. To hide behind the argument that the video, and other potentially harassing behaviors, were only intended as ‘jokes’ is a clear manifestation of the problematic role that humor can play in reinforcing exclusionary workplace cultures.
In cases such as this one, it is apparent that the exclusion, ridicule, and harassment functions of humor must be addressed in ways that do not reinforce the assumption that when joking is poorly received, blame can be deflected onto the individual who does not find the joke funny. This occurs in workplace disagreements over whether a particular line of joking constitutes sexual or gender harassment, or whether it is simply good-natured fun.26 In the case of the Spaniard’s Bay Fire Department, the deflection of Seymour’s complaints about workplace humor through an indictment of her supposed lack of a sense of humor operates to cover up deeper systemic issues present in the work environment. The point is not simply that individuals might perceive humor differently, but rather that humor is regularly invoked in workplaces to reinforce problematic (or hostile) workplace cultures which in turn reinforce traditional exclusions. The humor in a workplace can therefore act as an index of other systemic issues, such as sexism. This can play out not only in whether or not one finds a joke offensive, but also in who is given space to tell jokes and who is expected to laugh at them. In this case, we need to consider the extent to which joking is part of a hierarchical system in which not all parties can expect to participate equally. While the context of a fire department in a relatively small community might be taken as an isolated incident, rather than a systemic issue that can characterize an entire industry, it is made clear in our final case study that problematic and harassing humor cultures do exist on a much more widespread scale in other male-dominated workplaces such as policing and the military.
Case study three: the sexualized environment of the Canadian Armed Forces
Sexual harassment in hierarchical, predominantly male organizations such as fire departments, police forces, and the military is increasingly an object of scrutiny in Canada. In the fire department example considered above, it is notable that internal resistance remains a barrier to effecting cultural change. Not all organizations remain so entrenched in their opposition to considering the “gender issue,” however. In October of 2016, the RCMP commissioner offered a public apology to female members of the force who had experienced systemic gender harassment; the apology coincided with the settlement of two proposed class-action lawsuits and an announcement that new strategies would be put in place to alter the force’s problematic workplace culture.27
p.199
In an even more significant public admission of wrongdoing, the Canadian Armed Forces recently publicly acknowledged that they have been inadequate in addressing significant and widespread sexual harassment within their ranks. This admission was precipitated by the release of retired justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Marie Deschamps’ report, External Review into Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Harassment in the Canadian Armed Forces. Commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces as an independent review of its policies, procedures, and programs related to sexual harassment, the report found that the problem was not simply that quid-pro-quo sexual harassment and sexual assault were found to be occupational hazards for women and LGBTQ members of the Canadian Armed Forces, but more significantly, that the entire system reinforced a “sexualized environment [. . .] characterized by the frequent use of swear words and highly degrading expressions that reference women’s bodies, sexual jokes, innuendos, [and] discriminatory comments.”28
In an analysis of discrimination in the military, Elizabeth Kier argues that the need for a strong, unified organizational culture is particularly significant due to its reliance on commitment, obedience, discipline, and group cohesion. In practice, humor can be used to reinforce such a culture by establishing camaraderie and reinforcing group norms. However, it is also evident that such organizational culture can play a role in reinforcing problematic and discriminatory practices. As Deschamps has found, some of this camaraderie includes engaging in joking that creates a sexualized work environment. According to Kier, the positive identification that comes with a strong regimental culture and collective identity has a negative counterpart:
military cultures help create commitment but they also define and sharpen boundaries. Members of a group identify with as well as against others. Comparison and opposition are always present; there can be no in-group without an out-group, no “we” without a “they.”29
In their discussion of workplace humor, Holmes and Stubbe find that “jocular abuse” or joking insults are often expressions of solidarity. As such, women in male-dominated workplaces experience a “double-edged sword” with regards to “boys club” sexualized joking. If they are spared this joking because it only occurs when they are absent, they are not fully part of the in-group and as such are excluded from some spaces of social bonding. If, however, they want access to this level of camaraderie, they must accept and perhaps even participate in this joking, even if it is disproportionately offensive to women. In terms of organizational culture, this acceptance is required for women to reach what Edgar Schein describes as “group maturity,” which is characterized by an “emotional focus on preserving the group and its culture” and where “member differences are seen as a threat.”30 In the case of the pornographic video clip offered as a ‘joke’ in the previous case study, it was expected that the lone female participant in the course would simply be cool, and accept this sexualized joking as part of belonging to the club.
In the case of the Canadian Armed Forces, Deschamps argues that cultural change within the organization, at all levels of the chain of command, is essential to altering this hostile environment. It is not enough to clamp down on instances of harassment and assault; rather there needs to be a more general alteration to the culture of jokes, innuendos, and comments that contribute to the reproduction of this hostile environment. In a study of a non-military workplace, Beth Quinn finds that resistance tactics exist within the work environment, which enable sexual harassment to be interpreted as mere joking. In particular, Quinn finds that women who experience harassment are reluctant to identify it as such, preferring instead to interpret sexual joking as common “chain yanking” and to “not take it personally.”31 For this reason, very few instances of harassment are legally defined as such, and many employees who experience harassment do not report it. What is clear from both the Deschamps report and the Quinn study is that, in workplaces where harassment is systemic, significant changes to workplace culture are required, and existing processes for the reporting of harassment are inadequate.
p.200
Conclusions
Studies evaluating the receptivity of men and women to sexist and sexual jokes in the workplace have found that, in general, the majority of managers and employees perceive sexist joking as inappropriate.32 Despite this general agreement, 40% of survey respondents also indicated that they regularly encounter sexist and sexual jokes in their own workplaces.33 Humor in the workplace, therefore, continues to be a challenging issue, especially with regards to harassment.
Scholarly considerations of workplace humor tend to focus on its relationship to sexual and gender harassment. In their study of gender-related jokes in the workplace, Hemmasi, Graf and Russ grounded their discussion of offensive humor in the issue of subjectivity in humor perception, noting that what is “‘just good fun’ for one person could be ‘sexual harassment’ for another.”34 This perspective is prevalent in discussions of workplace harassment, where humor is simply ‘misinterpreted’ as sexual harassment.
How the issue of harassment is taken up can vary greatly, and not all those concerned about the issue of harassment are primarily focused on the needs of the potential victims of this joking. Instances of the trope of blaming the offended party, rather than the offending one, are widespread. For example, Howard Scott, a consultant writing for a dry-cleaning trade publication, characterizes the issue of workplace humor as being a dangerous terrain in which “You never know what will be considered ‘humor’ by one person and ‘offensive smut’ by another. [. . .] Moreover, when an individual sees the possibility of financial gain you don’t know how far the truth will be stretched.”35 In this instance, the real concern for employers is the potential for lawsuits fought on the grounds that workplace humor might constitute harassment. This perspective takes up the ‘employee making trouble’ perspective, in which good-natured workplace humor is just misinterpreted and misconstrued by a sensitive or conniving member. Fitting in to this workplace culture can require the acceptance of inappropriate uses of humor, absolving the utterer of wrongdoing by accepting that they were ostensibly ‘only joking.’ Claiming humorous intent therefore reinforces systemic exclusions, operates as a means of social intimidation, and can be used to deflect accusations of sexual harassment.
Along similar lines, journalist Cathy Young noted in 2003,
Women’s claims of “hostile environment” harassment are often based on a bawdy workplace atmosphere which seems to affect men and women alike, and to which other women may contribute. [. . .] [W]hat seems to be nearly extinct is any appreciation of diverse cultural norms in the workplace—of the fact that some work environments may be relatively straitlaced while others may be raunchy and freewheeling, and that people unhappy with the culture of their current job might simply seek other employment.36
p.201
Young’s perspective here is that the kind of humor that might be misinterpreted as contributing to a “hostile environment” in the workplace might have more to do with workplace culture. This is precisely what public criticisms of firefighter Brenda Seymour alluded to: that her complaints about harassment were invalid given the expectation that she ought to be more amenable to the raunchy workplace culture of the firehall. What these arguments overlook, is that this is indeed the problem. Humor is the shortest and surest path to the reproduction of problematic and exclusionary workplace cultures. While systems are often in place to deal with quid-pro-quo sexual harassment, or explicit verbal and physical expressions of sexual interest, it is much more difficult to address the subtle ways in which the underlying cultures of workplaces enable the exclusion of certain types of participants, especially, though not exclusively, through humor. It is important to note that humor is problematic in the workplace not only when it is harassment. The performance of the right kind of a ‘sense of humor,’ or the affective labor of laughing at the boss’s jokes, can also be part of defining ‘fit’ with workplace culture. As Karim H. Karim has argued, being able to engage in certain types of discussions of popular culture become “the entry point into casual conversations [. . .] or ‘water cooler talk.’”37 In this sense, humor can act as a more subtle, everyday aggression of gendered exclusion.
Changing these problematic cultures is not easy. Indeed, in the case of the Canadian military, it is clear that all levels of command are implicated in the reproduction of a sexualized work environment, and that changing this culture must come through the chain of command. In instances such as the Spaniard’s Bay Fire Department example, we see a clear reluctance on the part of high-ranking officials (the fire chief, the mayor) to admit that a problematic culture exists. In this case, pressure for change likely needs to come from an authoritative external source (for example, a labor association or other government body). While evaluating and altering organizational culture is possible (and indeed necessary to ensure the long-term health of the organization and its workforce), this change is only possible with buy-in from organizational influencers, and in some instances may be very difficult to achieve in the short-term.38
With the case studies that we have addressed above, we consider the ways in which the presumption of the inherent positivity of humor is particularly problematic for the reproduction of certain aspects of workplace culture. When emphasizing the positive role that humor plays in workplace cultures, there is a risk of reinforcing barriers to participation which are themselves often produced and reproduced through unwritten social codes. In other words, while speaking optimistically about the value of humor in daily life, we must also consider carefully the role of humor in relations and negotiations of power. While sexual harassment is perhaps the most obvious place to perceive the ways that humor can reproduce problematic power dynamics, it is important to emphasize that even non-sexualized humor can operate in this way. Indeed, when scholars and critics of humor emphasize the problem of joke perception (that is, the subjectivity of finding something funny or not), they overlook the role that humor plays in contexts of inequality, of producing in-groups and out-groups, and of reinforcing traditional biases and exclusions within workplace cultures. Humor in this sense acts as an index of other systemic issues within organizations. Furthermore, humor plays a gatekeeping function whereby workplace cultures are reinforced, and those who hope to succeed within that culture must assimilate to dominant humor expectations, or face potential alienation. Therefore, the problem is not whether individuals get the joke or can endure a little so-called chain yanking and not take it personally, but rather to what extent individuals are able to accept these aspects of workplace power dynamics as part of their daily working conditions.
p.202
References
1 Brunner, P. W., and Costello, M. L. (Spring 2002), Where’s the joke? The meaning behind sexual humor, Advancing Women in Leadership, retrieved from http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/spring2002/BRUNN~37.HTM [Accessed March 30, 2017].
2 Billig, M. (2005), Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, London: Sage, 11.
3 Bressler, E., Martin, R., and Balshine, S. (2006), Production and appreciation of humor as sexually selected traits, Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 121–130.
4 Karim, K. H. (2005), The elusiveness of full citizenship: Accounting for cultural capital, cultural competencies, and cultural pluralism, in Andrew, C., Gattinger, M., Jeannotte, M. S., and Straw, W. (Eds.), Accounting for Culture: Thinking through Cultural Citizenship, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 146–158.
5 Brunner, P. W., and Costello, M. L., op. cit.
6 Hemmasi, M., Graf, L., and Russ, G. (1994), Gender-related jokes in the workplace: Sexual humor or sexual harassment? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24(12), 1114–1128.
7 Peterson, M. A. (2005), Toward an ethnography of intertextuality, in Rothenbuhler, E. and Coman, M. (Eds.), Media Anthropology, London: Sage, 129.
8 Karim, op. cit., 151.
9 Critchley, S. (2002), On Humour, London: Routledge, 2.
10 Billig, op. cit., 13.
11 Mulkay, M. (1988), On Humor: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society, Boston, MA: Blackwell.
12 Brunner, P. W., and Costello, M. L., op. cit.
13 Coser, R. L. (1960), Laughter among colleagues: A study of the social functions of humor among the staff of a mental hospital, Psychiatry, 23, 86.
14 Coser, op. cit., 83.
15 Hemmasi, Graf, and Russ, op. cit., 1117.
16 Schein, E. H. (2010), Organizational Culture and Leadership, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
17 Holmes, J., and Stubbe, M. (2015), Power and Politeness in the Workplace: A Sociolinguistics Analysis of Talk at Work, London: Routledge, 3; see also Coser, op. cit.; Morreall, J. (1991), Humor and work, Humor, 4(4), 359–373.
18 Holmes, and Stubbe, op. cit., 4–5.
19 Chenier, E. (2016), When your institution treats you like a sex object, retrieved from http://elisechenier.com/2016/02/03/when-your-institution-treats-you-like-a-sex-object/?platform=hootsuite [Accessed April 4, 2016].
20 Daro, I. N. (2016), A Canadian university made this blatantly sexist video objectifying female professors, BuzzFeed News, retrieved from http://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/sfu-sweater-day-video#.bfBRvNEoN [Accessed April 4, 2016].
21 Montemurro, B. (2003), Not a laughing matter: Sexual harassment as ‘material’ on workplace-based situation comedies, Sex Roles, 48(9–10), 433.
22 Brunner, and Costello, op. cit.
23 Roberts, T. (2016, January 21), Porn in the classroom ‘just for a laugh,’ firefighting instructor says, CBC News, retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/porn-classroom-jeremy-hall-1.3413176 [Accessed October 31, 2016].
24 Brown, D. (2016, January 22), 20 male firefighters quit after only female colleague complains of harassment in Newfoundland town, Vice, retrieved from http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/20-male-firefighters-quit-after-only-female-colleague-complains-of-harassment-in-newfoundland-town [Accessed October 31, 2016].
25 Hopper, T. (2016, January 21), Crashed trucks, dead mice and porn, National Post, retrieved from http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/crashed-trucks-dead-mice-and-porn-inside-the-firefighting-scandal-tearing-apart-a-newfoundland-town [Accessed October 31, 2016].
p.203
26 Hemmasi, Graf, and Russ, op. cit.
27 Quan, D. (2016, October 5), RCMP to settle in workplace harassment class-action cases, apologize to victims, National Post, retrieved from http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/rcmp-to-settle-in-workplace-harassment-class-action-cases-apologize-to-victims-sources [Accessed October 31, 2016].
28 Deschamps, M. (2015), External review into sexual misconduct and sexual harassment in the Canadian Armed Forces, External Review Authority, ii.
29 Keir, E. (1999), Discrimination and military cohesion: An organizational perspective, in Katzenstein, M. F. and Reppy, J. (Eds.), Beyond Zero Tolerance: Discrimination in Military Culture, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 27.
30 Schein, op. cit., 205.
31 Quinn, B. A. (2000), The paradox of complaining: Law, humor, and harassment in the everyday work world, Law and Social Inquiry, 25(4), 1151–1185.
32 Hemmasi, Graf, and Russ, op. cit.; Graf, L., and Hemmasi, M. (1995, November), Risque humor, HR Magazine, 40(11).
33 Graf, and Hemmasi, op. cit.
34 Hemmasi, Graf, and Russ, op. cit., 1126.
35 Scott, H. (2002, December), Is it humor; or harassment? American Drycleaner, 69(9).
36 Young, C. (2003, January), Man trouble, Reason, 34(8), 19.
37 Karim, op. cit., 150.
38 Schein, E. H., and Bennis, W. G. (1965), Personal and Organizational Change through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach, New York: Wiley.