Have you heard the one about the CEO who proposed that funny business is actually good for business?

When newly minted Commonwealth Bank CEO Ralph Norris made his first public address, he claimed there was an accurate index a company could use to determine its health. Norris wasn’t referring to the bottom line, or even the triple bottom line. He was not talking about revenue, expenses or growth.

What Norris had in mind was a company’s humour quotient.

“You can always work out how an organisation is going if there is humour in the workplace,” Norris said. “If you don’t have that, there’s problems. Around the Commonwealth Bank, I want to see a lot more fun.”

To some present that day, Norris’ suggestion must have seemed eccentric. The corporate world, especially banking, is not synonymous with fun and laughter. Indeed, white-collar life is often depicted as a place of sombre, earnest work.

Nowhere is this more excruciatingly portrayed than in the BBC mockumentary The Office. This fake documentary follows the life and times of staff at Wernham Hogg, a drab fictional paper merchant in the drab, real-life English town of Slough. The Office focuses on the antics of manager David Brent, played by Ricky Gervais, who with his co-writer Stephen Merchant based the series on their middle-management experiences.

While Brent imagines himself a “chilled-out entertainer”, his colleagues and the audience see a crass, pathetic, bullying presence, whose antics and gags can be as agonising as they are offensive.

The Office works as a guide in how not to use humour in the workplace. Typical of Brent’s off-colour jokes is: “What’s the difference between a fox and a dog? About eight pints.”

His misfiring humour either offends, wastes time or sometimes even astonishes, as was the case during his short-lived career as a motivational speaker.

“Laughter is the best medicine,” explained a backwards-cap-attired Brent to his agog audience, and then attempted to get them to join him in a giggling session.

Pete Crofts, the founder of the world’s first Humourversity, based in suburban Melbourne, says inappropriately employing humour only to serves to underline that those wishing to employ it productively must first receive some guidance. It is, he says, a science as well as an art.

“Using humour and not knowing what you’re doing is like using a shotgun,” he explains. “Anyone can get hurt and get hit.”

Jack Levi, aka Elliot Goblet, performs most of his comedy work in the corporate arena.

“When you make people laugh you are taking control of their minds,” he says. “So, you’ve got to be very careful about what you say and the target you direct that towards.”

There are plenty of examples of real-life jokes gone wrong. Former US President Ronald Reagan employed full-time gag writers during his White House tenure, mostly to defray concerns about his age.

Sometimes, though, Reagan’s timing was way off.

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever,” he joked while testing a microphone during a 1984 sound check. “We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Not surprisingly this appalled his fellow Americans.

Then there was Alexander Downer’s gag about the “things that batter” that went down like a Japanese submarine.

Crofts’ Humourversity is a combination of library and training centre for stand-up comics, corporates and those keen to use humour more effectively.

“I’m for any humour that will release any anxiety, any fear, any frustration, any aggression,” he says. “But it can be used negatively. It can be used to develop stereotypes.”

That’s probably why when corporates do try use humour, it’s through the agency of an interloper, an expert such as Crofts, Levi or stand-up comic Rachel Berger who can offer her perspective on an issue without leaving collateral damage.

As well as performing in one-woman shows, Berger plays extensively in the corporate world, either as an MC at events, or introducing tailored material (such as the QUIT campaign) for workplaces.

Corporate sponsors such as WorkSafe also sponsor her live shows.

Berger says humour can be an exceptionally potent tool in the workplace. At corporate gigs, she sees her job as filtering a company’s issues through the lens of comedy.

Her modus operandi is to gather research about workplaces – “not dirt”, she insists – and then incorporate this into a personalised routine.

“I don’t ascribe to taking the piss out of people, because in the workplace that’s a form of bullying,” she says. “If I’m at a corporate gig and someone says, ‘We’d really like it of you took the piss out of the boss’. I won’t do it. Because what for? I’m not there to take the piss out of the boss. I’m there to give everybody a good time.

“If there are tensions in an organisation, I can talk to people and find out where the tensions lie, and then work that into a routine without the main culprits even knowing I’m talking about them … I don’t have to name names. What it does is give a voice to the people involved.”

Another advocate for using humour in the workplace is Levi, whose schtick is to present a character in Elliot Goblet who is so colourless as to be hilarious.

“As long as it doesn’t overtake and negatively affect the workings of an organisation, you can use humour to positively emotionally impact but also effect change,” Levi says. “For example, if someone is a persistent long lunch taker, and it’s a bit awkward actually articulating that to the person, you could get it across with humour by one day having huge welcome back signs all over his office when he returns.”

Of course, most of us spend a good deal of our lives at toil.

“We spend 41 per cent of waking hours at work,” writes David Firth in his book How to Work Make Fun. “Since we are asleep for 35 per cent [of our lives], it seems crazy to consign life, and with it, any hope of fun, to the remaining 24 per cent.”

Levi suggests “soft” humour, perhaps in newsletters and training videos, is an acceptable way to bring some mirth to a workplace. Practical jokes, he says, are out.

Crofts, who offers a range of courses about using humour in the workplace, believes that not enough of us take humour seriously.

“The reality is that the jokes that have been told at negotiating tables have possibly prevented nuclear war more than any other means,” Crofts says. “The fact is that if you’re standing around shouting and somebody cracks a joke, it releases the tension and that allows you to come back to some normality and to be able to look at something from a different perspective.”

Not all comics are born funny. Crofts insists it’s a competency that can and should be taught.

“If a sense of humour is taught in the classroom the way a sense of politics is taught and a sense of religion is taught, the kids are going to come out of school with common sense,” explains Crofts, who tackled the subject in his book How to Use Humour in Business & Life. “It’s a skill, like any other skill – you don’t have to have a talent for it. It’s a series of processes, techniques, formulas and devices.”

Humour is a panacea that can be used as an escape from when things aren’t going so well, but also as a means of wealth generation.

Crofts believes you can use humour to solve problems in a more creative way, make more creative decisions in your life and find more creative opportunities to do business.

Finding a place for humour in the professional domain is certainly not a new phenomenon. US corporate giants Kodak and IBM have employed humour consultants in the past, because they believe in the workplace it can play a transformative role.

“The thing about laughter and humour is it can actually shift you from being reactive to proactive,” Berger says. “Think about it: the reason people laugh is because they get something they’re not expecting.”

Berger believes most workers are powerless but when they are laughing, they actually feel they have a degree of power.

“That moment when you laugh, there’s a little tear in the fabric of the world that lets you see, ‘Well there is some sunshine. Maybe not now, but out there, there is’. And so it just makes you feel a lot lighter,” she says.

“It’s like somebody coming in the middle of the night when you’re having a nightmare and turning the light on and saying, ‘It’s OK darling, it’s just a nightmare’. So, of all the places in the world, humour should be in the workplace.”

That’s one issue at least, on which she and the CBA’s Norris can concur.

This article was first published in the August 2006 edition of INTHEBLACK magazine.