Puns are hated and loved.

But so is fun, it seems, in a business context.

How has this come about?

Why, at work, do team leaders think that laughing = trivial, and serious = important  It’s so clearly untrue.  Any comedy writer worth their salt lives and works with the knowledge that comedy is an outlet for rage.

What catalyses rage? Something that matters: something important.  (See Jonathan Lynn ‘Comedy Rules’. Rule no 40).  Try the holding a pen in your teeth exercise. The forced (physically forced) smile will increase your amusement at being shown anything funny, and at any attempt to hide ‘funny’.

Despite constant denial, we really all are ‘embodied’.   Our view of things is as influenced by innate bodily ‘intelligence’ as by cognitive intelligence.  We all have a universal human mechanism for grasping triviality or importance that works independently of any social patterning we may have bought into.

Or are being forced to buy into.

Truly, why shun one of the most important and effective ways of encouraging spontaneous, in-flow talent and skills to surface?

That’s what laughing can do.

We are so often and so tiringly in what RD Laing called ‘double binds’.
The double binds of strength -v- vulnerability, confidence -v- humility, individual ambition -v- team player are all at work, at work.

Laughing can reconcile and liberate.

Have a team laugh.

Pun intended.