Table Of ContentBarbara Plester
The Complexity
of Workplace
Humour
Laughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of
Humour
The Complexity of Workplace Humour
Barbara Plester
The Complexity
of Workplace Humour
L aughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of Humour
Barbara Plester
Management & International Business
University of Auckland Business School
Auckland , New Zealand
ISBN 978-3-319-24667-3 ISBN 978-3-319-24669-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24669-7
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For Paul – thanks for sharing a lifetime of
laughter with me.
Foreword: Defying Gravity
One of the ways in which we, smarty pants in the Global North, distinguish high
culture from low culture, that we decide what matters matter, is on the basis of
whether something is ‘serious’. This is a word with several related meanings, but all
imply earnestness of purpose or gravity. To be serious suggests a certain depth, an
attention to the profound conditions of human nature, a kind of style which guaran-
tees truth or a systematic procedure which promises rigour. So when we suggest that
something is a ‘serious’ book or fi lm, we mean that it has consequences for how we
might live our lives. It might be hard, but careful study will be rewarded by those
who have been trained how to study carefully. I suppose the opposite here might be
‘trivial’ or ‘popular’, a piece of work or action which diverts attention for a little
while but that we really shouldn’t bother to remember the next morning. Like a song
from a musical (‘I’m through with playing by the rules, of someone else’s game’) it
drifts away as the work day begins in earnest.
A related meaning of the word ‘serious’ is another opposition, but this time it
addresses one of the features of trivia – that it might be funny. To say that someone
is serious means that they don’t crack a smile, or if it is applied to a condition, it is
to say that we shouldn’t laugh, because that would be wicked or immoral. Serious
things are not humorous, and the implication is that they shouldn’t be trivialised by
being made humorous. No one should be fl ippant about the holocaust, or respond to
Mahler with a belly laugh. You don’t fart in church. Etymologically, the serious
comes from ideas about weight and heaviness. The body and brain ache under the
pressure, and concentration is required in order to do justice to the gravity of the
situation.
U niversities are often temples to the serious, places of gravitas. They are build-
ings in which serious people do serious things, brows are furrowed and heads
scratched. You don’t giggle in the library. Business and management schools are
even more serious, because they are inhabited by people who care about the bottom
line, wear suits and stroke their chins. Not to take business seriously would be to
invite disaster. Fools and jesters would squirt jelly into the spreadsheets, causing
factories to close and skyscrapers left to stand empty and echo as rookeries for crows.
You can’t clown around with the machinery of capitalism. You might break it.
vii
viii Foreword: Defying Gravity
What makes human beings so interesting is that they know all this and then they
fart in church and giggle in the library anyway. Someone in my university recently
turned all the notices on a notice board upside down, which required a great deal of
time spent with drawing pins and produced many oddly authoritarian email
exchanges as well as much giggling. No set of social rules, even ones which are
widely agreed and codifi ed, ever produces complete obedience. If you don’t believe
me, google ‘paedophile jokes’, or consider the sort of gallows or graveyard humour
which you fi nd in places and professions where violence and death are present.
Order and disorder are made in the same moment; they are made next to each other,
as a condition of each other’s existence.
The University, and the Business School, will always fi nd it diffi cult to capture
rule breaking and bending, whether as topic of enquiry or as a practice within the
institution. (I don’t know who did the notice board thing. It wasn’t me.) We proba-
bly shouldn’t be too worried about this but instead rather relieved, because it sug-
gests that there are always some matters that escape organization. As Barbara
Plester’s splendid book shows, formal institutions are wonderful examples of the
sinuous way in which structures become inhabited by meanings, places in which the
trivial and the serious are always pushing up against each other. There is a serious
lesson here, because it illustrates that we should never imagine that the trivial
doesn’t matter. Etymologically, the trivial was what the common people talked
about at a road junction, somewhere where there were three ways to go. They chat-
ted and laughed and farted, sang popular songs and laughed at the King and then
went back to working in the fi elds for their lord and master. No wonder that this sort
of knowledge didn’t make it into the university.
A s Plester shows, whatever theory of humour we deploy, humour at work is very
often marking the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between what ‘we’ talk
about between ourselves and what we think ‘they’ think and do and say. It is a way
of making organization too, a method for making and questioning the categories of
time, space and person which shape the experience of being constructed by an insti-
tution. Once you can joke, you know you understand the rules and can show that
you understand them. Anthropologically, humour clearly matters in organizations –
whether the irreverent email, repeated parody of a strap line or defaced notice. This
implies that we should not let ourselves be distracted into believing that only that
which claims to matter, which claims to be serious, does really matter.
I nstitutions do weigh down on us. They are serious things, they make us breath-
less and we can’t always just laugh them off with a timely limerick or clicking your
heels three times and imagining you were somewhere else. The many horrors of the
world will not be solved by puns and a hopeful smile, and many of those horrors are
implicated in the sort of humour that is excused as ‘only joking’. The gravity of the
world is clear enough, and it does furrow brows, but that description does not
exhaust all that human beings are. This book shows us that we will always be able
to laugh at the Wizard of Oz and that the trivial is actually really important. That’s
the punch line, so all you need to do now is enjoy the way that this book shows you
why studying humour is a serious business.
Foreword: Defying Gravity ix
M artin Parker is Professor of Organization and Culture at the School of
Management at the University of Leicester. He likes to imagine alternative ways in
which we might think about and do organizing (A lternative Business: Outlaws
Crime and Culture, Routledge, 2012; The Companion to Alternative Organization ,
Routledge, 2014). His plans for the next year involve tower cranes, spies and detec-
tives, as well as a project on the medians, central and verges next to big roads.
University of Leicester , Leicester , UK Martin Parker
