Leaders, Don’t Let Your Jokes Fall Flat

Researchers have long recognized that humor can grab attention, deepen social connection, and build attraction. For business leaders, a well-timed joke can defuse boardroom tension, build rapport with a new team, and make complex strategic messages more memorable. Yet, attempting humor at work is notoriously risky. We have all witnessed a leader’s joke fall completely flat, leaving a room in awkward silence. Research reveals that failed humor diminishes a leader’s social capital, resulting in lower follower respect, reduced likability, and compromised perceptions of their competence and legitimacy. Why do some humorous attempts land perfectly while others fail? Philosophers as far back as Aristotle have argued that comedy is built on surprise. A joke works because something unfolds differently than what we expect. However, big surprises come with big risks. If an audience lacks the required knowledge to understand a joke, or if the unexpected leap is too large, it becomes difficult to make sense of the joke. And meaningless material is not funny. To succeed, comedy must strike a balance between surprise and coherence; it needs to present an unexpected surprise that nevertheless immediately makes sense. In our recent research spanning two published papers involving nearly 1,300 participants across six distinct experiments, we explored what makes things funny. The bottom line is straightforward: Comedy is much funnier when it is easier to process. Why the Funniest Jokes are the Easiest to Understand A joke can be easy or difficult to process for many reasons. A joke might be hard to hear over a bad Zoom connection or difficult to read on a cluttered presentation slide. Conceptually, the vocabulary might be too complex, or the underlying reference might require niche knowledge. Regardless of the source, hundreds of experiments in cognitive science document that how easy (or difficult) something is to process affects our evaluation of it. Among other things, messages that are easy to process seem more true and coherent. To test whether it affects the funniness of a joke, we conducted six experiments using different comedic materials, including internet memes, punchlines, and nicknames. In one set of experiments, we tested how audio clarity impacts the funniness of a performance. We had participants listen to audio clips of stand-up comedians. Half of the participants heard the original, clear recordings, while the other half heard the same clips with the added background sounds of a noisy venue. The results showed that participants found the jokes funnier when they were easier to hear. Next, we tested the effects of visual clarity on the funniness of image-based humor. For half of the trials, participants saw humorous memes in their original format; for the other half, we lowered the image exposure and color saturation, making them slightly harder to visually process. The results were clear: participants found memes less funny when they were harder to see. Moving on to language, we next tested whether jokes are funnier when they rhyme or alliterate. It’s easier to process two words when they share the same sounds, so we predicted that rhyme and alliteration would enhance a joke’s funniness. We created novel, fill-in-the-blank joke setups with two equivalent punchline options. For some jokes, one option rhymed (e.g., “The Snore Store”), whereas an alternative punchline used a synonym that did not rhyme (e.g., “The Snore Shop”). Participants overwhelmingly selected the rhyming or alliterating punchlines as funnier than their non-rhyming or non-alliterating alternatives. We also looked at whether easy processing makes an aggressive joke feel softer and more benign. To test this, we described scenarios where a person was given a nickname that either alliterated (e.g., “Dirty Derek”) or did not (e.g., “Dirty Chris”). Some nicknames were cruel and aggressive (e.g., “Dirty Derek”) while others were more benign and playful (e.g., “Fit Frances”). While we don’t believe that nicknaming in any way is a productive kind of joke in a professional setting, we wanted to test whether these literary devices might alter how offensive such jokes might be. We found that alliteration did not make the aggressive nicknames seem less insulting or more benign. For anyone communicating in the workplace, this distinction is a critical warning: Making your joke easier to process will not save an insulting or inappropriate remark from offending your team. This is a unique and magnified risk for all jokes in the office, as separate research has demonstrated that controversial jokes are perceived as more offensive when people imagine hearing them in the workplace compared to other environments. We did find, instead, that easier processing made the jokes seem more coherent, which seemed to explain the boost in funniness. When you look at comedy through this lens, it suddenly makes sense why comedians rely on the same go-to techniques. It is easier for an audience to process information they have already seen before. Hence, running gags, callback jokes, and inside jokes work well because they rely on prior knowledge—making them easier to process. Utilizing a familiar structure, such as an analogy or a meme template (i.e., “X people when there’s Y at the function”), can also facilitate easy processing, and thus funniness. Ending a joke with a catchphrase or a smile can also help clarify to an audience that you’re telling a joke, so the audience doesn’t have to waste energy guessing the speaker’s intent. Strategic pauses in delivery and changes in vocal intonation that replicate a classic comedian’s delivery can have the same effect. You don’t need to be a naturally gifted comedian to use humor effectively at work. For leaders looking to communicate more effectively, these findings boil down to three practical takeaways for using humor at work: Don’t hide the joke. Make it rhyme or alliterate. Build on shared knowledge and familiar structures. Don’t Hide the Joke The most immediate and practical application of our research for managers involves controlling the environment and delivery of your message to make it easy to hear and recognize, especially in an environment where competing demands on the audience’s attention are already high. If you are delivering a lighthearted opening at a company town hall, the acoustics of the room and whether the audience has quieted down matter immensely. If the audience has to strain to hear you over a poor microphone, disruptive colleagues, or a bad internet connection on a hybrid call, your joke is highly likely to fail. Similarly, if your subtle body language or facial expressions are key to the audience understanding the joke you are making, the lighting and the audience’s distance from the stage will impact its funniness. It’s also important to make your intentions clear when telling a joke. Regardless of how quiet the room is, if you deliver a witty observation in a flat, monotone voice or rush past it without changing your cadence, the audience will struggle to interpret whether you are being serious or not. Using dramatic vocal intonations, exaggerated facial expressions, and pauses to mark your material as a joke can help accomplish this. Just be mindful of the balance: clearly signaling a joke can also put some pressure on the audience to laugh, which can lead to fake laughter from a polite audience or groans from a more confrontational one. Embrace the Power of Rhyme and Alliteration Our experiments also revealed that participants consistently found punchlines and phrases funnier when they rhymed or alliterated. While this might sound like advice meant for artists rather than executives, this is an incredibly potent tool in business communication. When two words share the same initial sound (alliteration) or the same ending sound (rhyme), they are processed more rapidly and fluidly. For a manager, this means that the specific words you use to frame a lighthearted observation can drive whether it receives a chuckle or a blank stare. We don’t recommend speaking in limericks, but you can lean into rhythmic phrasing when trying to make a memorable, amusing point. If a project has gone slightly off the rails due to bureaucratic red tape, referring to it playfully as the “paperwork purgatory” rather than “an administrative delay” utilizes alliteration to make the phrase cognitively satisfying. Similarly, one can refer to a project involving a deeply frustrating and massive spreadsheet as “Excel hell.” These devices work because shared sounds can make uncommon pairings of concepts (i.e., “paperwork” and “purgatory”) feel inherently connected. When leaders use rhyming or alliterative phrasing to point out workplace absurdities, they aren’t just being clever; they are making their words easier to process for their audiences. This makes the jokes feel “fitting” and “correct.” The next time you are drafting an email to your team or preparing remarks for a corporate dinner, scan your text for opportunities to replace words with punchier, alliterative pairings. It is a scientifically validated way to make your communication more engaging. Just remember that a little goes a long way. Most people don’t speak or draft emails like William Shakespeare, so overdoing it can come across as unnatural. Build on Shared Knowledge and Familiar Structures The easiest way to make a joke easy to process, and therefore funnier, is to ground it in what the audience already knows. Even better if it builds on things or experiences they are frequently exposed to. An inside joke about a quirky legacy software system that only your team would know about, or a lighthearted callback to a memorable moment from your company’s last offsite, works surprisingly well, as do running gags, callback jokes, and inside jokes. This shared knowledge is often built through repetition, making the information very easy for the brain to process. Because your team already has the background knowledge, the cognitive work required to get the joke is very small. Aside from using familiar content for comedy, leaders can also consider using familiar joke structures. Different jokes trend all the time, from recent jokes “How it started vs. How it’s going” and “Girl math” to older ones “How many X does it take to change a lightbulb?” Building on these familiar structures while substituting a word or two to fit a given context can score a lot of laughs. For example, a leader could make a joke about “corporate math” while discussing a silly organizational mistake, such as over-catering an event. . . . Understanding how humor works also shows us why it is so appreciated. Telling a good joke requires more than just thinking about the content of what you say. It requires thinking about how aspects of your joke will interact with the audience and the context they’re hearing it in. The same strategies that make a joke funnier also tend to show empathy and thoughtfulness—a great way to build relationships and community with your colleagues.

Leaders, Don’t Let Your Jokes Fall Flat

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