Can Leaders Laugh? Should They?

There are few human beings more exhausting to be with than people without a sense of humour. They may be conscientious, professionally accomplished, kind to animals and meticulous about recycling their garbage. Yet after twenty minutes in their company, one begins to understand why civilisation invented alcohol.

Contrary to appearances, humour is not a frivolous topic. In a short essay, Freud described it as possessing a liberating quality: Humour is how one refuses to be overwhelmed by the blows of reality. The classic example is the condemned prisoner, on his way to his execution on a Monday morning, remarking that this is a good beginning to the week.

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The ego slips on a banana peel

To laugh at ourselves is to perform a small psychological miracle. For a few seconds, we step away from the “heroic” narrative of our own existence and observe at some distance this ridiculous creature called “me”. Hopefully, our dignity survives the ordeal.

People who can say, “I made a complete fool of myself” and genuinely laugh accomplish something more sophisticated than self-deprecation. They demonstrate that their identities are sufficiently secure to survive evidence of imperfection. In contrast, a fragile ego cannot afford this luxury. For the psychologically brittle person, being laughed at is an assault on the integrity of the self. 

Hence the stronger the self, the less seriously the individual needs to take itself. In fact, those who desperately need to appear important often become prisoners of their own importance. This leaves little room for irony, playfulness or self-mockery. And as self-importance expands, humour recedes.

Think of the pompous executive entering the room like royalty. Nobody interrupts her. If she laughs, the room laughs. If she does not, the room gathers that the remark was never funny in the first place. Power produces many advantages, but reliable information about one’s comic ability is rarely among them.  

What about people who do not laugh – or those who laugh all the time?

People differ vastly in what they find funny. Some reserved people may possess an exquisite sense of humour which they rarely display publicly. People who seldom laugh may be depressed, preoccupied or culturally restrained. Or they may also be surrounded by people who are not very amusing. Even gender matters.

For some others, solemnity has become an identity. They associate seriousness with competence, authority or superiority. To them, it may be a form of psychological armour. Such people may distrust laughter because it threatens their sense of control. 

Of course, humour can also be a defence. Some people joke compulsively because seriousness frightens them. This is when every painful conversation becomes a comedy routine, every uncomfortable feeling an occasion for a punchline. The jokes then become a way of avoiding feelings. Just like seriousness, nonstop joking can be a form of emotional rigidity.

Psychological health lies in the capacity to move between all modes of expression without becoming imprisoned by any. It means being serious when reality demands seriousness, playful when there is room for play and capable of humour even when circumstances have become painfully serious.

Just like a democracy without jesters becomes dangerous, a corporation without jesters is not much healthier.

The king and his fool

Long before psychoanalysts began charging by the hour to tell powerful people uncomfortable truths, kings employed jesters. Dressed in multi-coloured motley, bells and sometimes a cap with donkey ears, the fool could say things that might have cost regular courtiers their head.

A good jester performed an essential psychological function: He introduced reality into a system organised around pleasing power. Even today, every powerful person needs someone who can say, “Your Majesty, that is ridiculous” and still live to enjoy breakfast.

Secure leaders create institutional jesters. These include trusted advisers, dissenters, independent directors, journalists, contrarians, spouses, old friends, people granted sufficient psychological permission to puncture grandiosity. On the other hand, insecure leaders eliminate them. 

The absence of jesters leads to a predictable result. Once the fool disappears, everyone else becomes serious. When everybody becomes serious, the king becomes a genius. Sooner or later, the kingdom collapses.

Hence the fool’s task is not merely to make the king laugh. It is to help the king think. Just like a democracy without jesters becomes dangerous, a corporation without jesters is not much healthier.

The many colours of humour

To say that someone has a sense of humour tells us surprisingly little. What matters is not simply whether someone uses humour, but what kind of humour it is.

Canadian psychologist Rod Martin and his colleagues introduced the Humour Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) in 2003, identifying four broad styles according to the psychological and interpersonal functions of humour. 

1. Affiliative humour says, “We are in this together.” 

Friends who tease one another affectionately confirm intimacy. It shows that the relationship is secure enough to tolerate play. After all, shared laughter lowers defences and creates a sense of belonging. Humour then becomes a social glue, reminding us that whatever our differences, we are all actors in in the same wonderfully imperfect human comedy.

2. Self-enhancing humour says, “This is awful, but I’ll get over it.” 

Such humour enables us to gain distance from adversity without pretending it does not exist. This type of humour flourishes in dark places such as hospitals, battlefields and prisons.

For example, gallows humour does not necessarily signal indifference to suffering. Sometimes it is what makes suffering bearable. The same applies to jokes about ageing. The senior who jokes about the alarming number of doctors in her address book may be preserving her own sanity. 

3. Self-defeating humour says, “Look at what kind of hopeless donkey I am.”

Insecure people may make themselves the butt of the joke before anyone else gets the idea; it is a form of pre-emptive self-attack. Healthy self-directed humour lets us acknowledge our foolishness but never turns into a verdict on our worth. We can laugh at ourselves without needing to diminish ourselves. 

4. Aggressive humour says, “You are ridiculous.” 

Mockery, ridicule and sarcasm can become instruments of hierarchy and domination. A proverb of Solomon says: “Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbour and says, ‘I was only joking!’” It’s like a double punch: the person injures you, then converts your protest as evidence that you lack a sense of humour. Bullies understand this without having read Freud.

The last laugh

Humour may ultimately be a measure of psychological freedom. Can I tolerate contradiction and even imperfection? Can I discover that I am wrong without collapsing? Can I laugh when the joke is on me? These capacities overlap remarkably with what we call psychological maturity – a much desirable quality in any leader.

Humour involves surrender. For an instant, we abandon the heroic version of ourselves. We admit that we are vain, frightened, lustful, jealous, pompous mammals who exert extraordinary energy pretending otherwise. We build corporations and empires – and then walk straight into a glass door we never saw.

The capacity to laugh at oneself is a psychological feat. The child wants to be taken seriously. The adolescent wants to look cool. The mature adult eventually discovers the terrible secret: Everyone is ridiculous: presidents and professors, billionaires and psychoanalysts, generals and lovers, nobel laureates and essayists – especially people who write essays about humour.

The jester’s deepest function was to protect power from believing its own publicity. Whenever kings could hear “You too can be wrong” and laugh, there was still hope for their kingdom. The same may be true for the rest of us and for our organisations today.