2.
HUMOUR

Life at the edge can become very serious quickly, but this is quite natural. After all, facing the unknown through redundancy, illness or losing sleep due to a critical dilemma at work is no laughing matter. Yet paradoxically, humour and lightness may be just what’s needed in the situation.

In the work context laughter is often portrayed as trivial, at best the consequence of banter and office humour, making the time go a little quicker. At worst it is seen as a silly, inappropriate escape from painful feelings and facing the “gravity” of a situation; certainly not fitting for the seriousness of business.

Joseph Geary, a positive psychologist from Dublin, decided that the best way for him to develop his humour was to train as a stand-up comedian. He distinguishes himself from the typical comedians, who are told from an early age that they’re “naturally funny.” “I would like to make it clear that I was never told such things, but that will never stop me from making a fool out of myself. At least as a fool, I am honest.”

After a period of travelling, Joseph settled down in London and enrolled in a comedy school in Camden. On the first week, the students were asked to recount the most embarrassing experience of their lives. “I recognized that this exercise would gauge how much we were willing to betray our ego in favour of honesty, in order to make people laugh. I was thrilled at first, as I felt that my own ego would be quite manageable (we Irish are trained to betray our ego from birth). I was confident that I would be able to dig deep and bare everything, metaphorically speaking in this instance.”

However, when it came to his first performance, Joseph felt his fear rise. He questioned whether the strangers in the class would hold his failure as lightly as he did. “I began to recount a youthful escapade about how I ‘half-lost’ my virginity (I’ll spare you the details and leave you in as much confusion as existed on the night in question). However, as I told my story to these strangers, I noticed that I detached from my feelings. I detached from their judgement and I saved my little ego.” What if the audience took him too seriously? Joseph wondered. Further, was it possible to live alongside people who took life too seriously? How could he help people see the funny side?

The course prompted a spiritual awakening (otherwise known as a “breakdown,” says Joseph), which was made more severe when his comedy mentors asked him to think about everything he loved and hated in life. Again, Joseph recognized the call for him to expose his true self, his passions in life. “And that was the key. For other people to see the funny side, I needed to be a ‘verbal magician’ and misdirect them with my passion. I was playing it cool and holding back how much I loved and hated the world because I didn’t want the audience to get anxious, but that’s exactly what’s required! Being an ‘average Joe’ didn’t stir them up enough.”

To live true to his purpose of “making the world feel good,” Joseph realized that he needed to begin with his own vulnerabilities and anxieties. Making the audience anxious at the beginning would pave the way for laughter, he discovered. This view is supported by the false-alarm theory, proposed by neuro-scientist VS Ramachandran. If we look to our primate cousins, they too get upset or confused, and consequently experience anxiety as they navigate their environment. When a chimp sees a snake and feels fear, they will shriek instinctively to warn others nearby, who then join in the shrieking to help raise the alarm. However, if the “snake” turns out to be a harmless stick, the chimp will laugh, and thus raise the “false-alarm” signal. Again, others nearby will join in the laughter to communicate that we all made a silly mistake. We laugh to communicate the very important message: “Don’t Panic!”

“So when we feel afraid of the unknown, it’s okay,” Joseph reassures us. “There’s a punchline coming.”

Humour can defuse difficult situations and help overcome the negative and uncomfortable feelings arising at the edge. So rather than take things too seriously, we can take a leaf out of Joseph’s book and turn the vulnerability and anxiety into a different story. One where we can laugh at ourselves and the situation and hold life lightly. This attitude is also embodied in the character of the clown.

A few years ago Annick Zinck, a leadership consultant based in Switzerland, completed an action research project into the intersection between play, clowning and leadership titled What can Mr Leader learn from Mr Clown in unstable times? The outcome was “Leadership Lab,” a process bringing clown art and leadership together, that she developed with Tom Greder, a clown performing artist.

“The clown is comfortable with paradox and plays with ambiguity to create alternatives in the unknown. The clown practice is an opportunity to learn by doing, feeling and experimenting, as opposed to other more cognitive learning practices which dominate the world of work,” says Annick. She argues that leaders who tend to look for technical, ready-made answers to complex problems can learn these skills by tapping into their childhood experiences and developing their own clown character.