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We all have to face difficult situations. Some of them of our making and others the world drops unceremonoiusly in our laps, as in the case of Commander Puller below. How we deal with it is crucial. Wit, even dark with has it's place. Lucky for use there's a name for that sort of humor: Laconic Wit. This type of humor is one that can help us in so many ways. One way Laconic Wit is so particularly valuable, is the power it has to make certain points crystal clear. There is nothing like humor to cut right to the heart of the matter. There are few other communication styles that we use that can do what humor does so effectively. There’s a name for a sort of the quick-cutting humor, well known throughout history: Laconic Wit. The term itself comes from the area around the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, Laconia because the ancient Spartans were renown for their penchant for this sort of humor. I’ve mentioned them before in other posts. Here’s an example of Laconic Wit. It’s not exactly a joke, but there is, like with most Laconic sayings, humor buried there. Wit isn’t always laugh out loud funny, but whatever exactly it is, it’s squarely in the realm of humor. Polycratidas was a Spartan emissary and when he was asked by a dignitary if he had come publically or privately, he responded “If we succeed, publically. If not, privately.” Another example comes from U.S. commander Chesty Puller, who, when he was surrounded by the enemy, remarked, "We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things." If you want to see more of them, please check out the Wikipedia page devoted to these sayings https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Laconic_phrases. It’s not an accident that most of the examples come from areas related to statecraft or warfare. Why would we choose to use such humor, especially in times of tension? The answer seems to come from a couple of places. There are two distinct ways that Laconic Wit seems to function. The first is that it aptly, quickly, or directly brings out a point that is present, clearly important, but something we might, for the sake of politeness, cover over. For Commander Puller, he’s being ironic. He’s also focusing on the positive. They have, indeed, found the enemy, so that problem’s sovled. His clever way of relating the facts admits an often fatal flaw for a commander—allowing his unit to be surrounded. Clearly a no-no if you want to win. Unless that was part of his secret strategy. He could have just gone straight into normal emergency speak and declare the tactical blunder and plead for help. But he didn’t. He acknowledged it, and then was clearly now dealing with the consequences. The second function of the Laconic Wit is to identify an issue rather quickly. Take the Spartan emissary. His response is all about highlighting the important issue: his being there to accomplish something important. So important that he’d rather not advertise any failure. Success? Advertise away. His answer also probably made his professional partner, the opposing dignitary, feel a little more at ease as well. Polycratidas uses the wit in a way that reaches the other dignitary about a topic that the two share. It’s like wryly sharing an issue or complaint with only someone who would share that sort of understanding with you—like a person in the same professional field. A final aspect that comes in some, but not all cases of Laconic Wit, is the treatment of a tragedy or problem through the lens of humor. As we know, when we use humor near in time to situations that are tragic or distressing, it can make the situation easier to deal with. The humor doesn’t make Commander Puller’s situation less tragic or fraught with difficulty and danger, or Polycratidas’ position as a dignitary there to accomplish some important mission of state less weighty, but it does make the perspective of the individual lighter going into dealing with the issues at hand. And as many have said before, attitude is crucial. We would do well to cultivate the use of this humor in our lives. It can make a number of less enjoyable situations, even desperate situations all the more tolerable and easier to deal with. This alone should be reason enough to try and be wittier.

This post is the third one in a four-part series on using humor in interviews. The first one just related a story of a time when I was put on the spot to use humor in an interview for a job I needed. The second one opened up and expanded on some of the things we want to see from folks in interviews and how humor can help. There are a couple themes from these and from my overall approach to humor. The first is that humor, while not the main tool in your interviewing toolkit, should be something you feel free to use. The second is that if you’re avoiding humor because you don’t want to seem not serious, this is a mistake. Humor and seriousness are not opposites. They’re partners. Finally, using humor well demonstrates things about you that are ultimately attractive to potential employers. Humorous anecdotes are great ways to get a message across and get it remembered. It also happens to be helpful in making difficult topics seem less so. If you can find a clever story about your experience to demonstrate something about you, how you overcame a challenge, or how you manage time, then find a way to deliver some or all of that story with some humor. One of the things that I do when asked about my biggest “weakness” is relate that I once had a colleague state that I am either direct or impolitic depending on your perspective and I play up the seeming contradiction in the description. Humor relies on incongruity. The fact that I deliver it as a story a “close colleague” says about me makes it seem less a problem. And let’s be honest no one goes into an interview and describes they’re biggest weakness as the “inability to take deadlines seriously.” In the same way I just want to say, “I want this job because I like to eat,” I don’t. We joke about that response with our friends or in the memes on the internet, but not in a real interview. But my use of irony helps answer what is my strength and weakness with the same information. Another way in which we can use humor is to reduce the negative feelings surrounding some issue. If you recall the last blog, I used a little self-deprecatory humor to dispel worries that I was unprofessional when a notification on my phone pinged mid-interview. It’s well known that humor makes physical pain feel less so, and helps us tolerate stress better, or make it go away. So how can we use that in an interview? Like any aspect of life, work has difficult situations. Since my job is in academia and I work with students, one question that comes up is how to deal with a student with issues. I have a go to line about students that I use that I think (of course I do) is witty and usually gets a smile. I will say that students are usually high-drive, goal oriented, high-achieving, and also high maintenance. When you burn the candle at both ends, you liable to run into issues. Also, we know how well 18-22 year olds are at dealing with stress. I say this with appropriate winks and nods so as to bring the other educators in on the joke. Students stress and they can be quick in the emotional swings. We know this. Our job is to get them to get a handle on their emotions and do so in a way that’s effective. We don’t want to meet their panic with panic. That wouldn’t be helpful. We want to meet it with assuredness or even a little humor to show them that things aren’t solvable. The humor serves as both a distraction and an emotional cue that we’re able to deal with these issues. When I make my little joke about student emotions, the other faculty get it; they know. They also know that I am not dismissing the problem. I am using a strategy to deal with it. It’s a strategy they appreciate. If we all met stress and panic with more stress and panic, we wouldn’t be able to survive all that well. The main thing here is to think about your situation. The struggle I face when telling people how to use humor, is that I don’t know their history. I don’t know the things that might be apt for humor. But if you look for clever ways to describe things, witty ways to relate ideas, you’re going to find ways to use humor to deal with those sensitive situations. Trust me, I’ve practiced this for a while. Next week we’ll wrap up this series by talking about how humor and laughter isn’t the opposite of seriousness. We’ll go through a few ways we can show this in our interviews.

Mel Brooks once said that “humor is just another defense against the universe.” I find the ability to laugh off difficulty, to approach the craziness that is our world with a smile, to be fascinating and a source of endless reward. So many people I admire have found ways to use humor in the most difficult of times. There’s something so completely final as a good laugh in a tough spot. It’s this beautiful pause that restores and rejuvenates us as we move on. I am an amateur woodworker and often it’s a challenge for me to think in a visual way. As you can imagine, that makes woodworking, so dependent on good visual spatial abilities, can cause me fits. I have progressed much slower than many. I imagine if I’d been employed in a woodworking shop, I’d have long ago been asked to leave. So one day I was working on a big project and there was a failure that I had never contemplated. It was a biggie. My wife said that I looked as dejected as she’d ever seen me. After I sort of processed the calamity, I posted about it on Facebook. A woodworking friend of mine made a joke making fun of the situation and then quipped as a sort of apology “Too soon?” In truth, it was funny, and then I realized that it wasn’t too soon. Rather it wasn’t soon enough. I should have been moving on. The failure wasn’t going to change, only my attitude towards moving forward. And that joke helped me change my attitude. That’s beauty of a good joke or quip. They remind us of the finality of the situation. No amount of anger or sadness was going to change the fact that my build was messed up. What’s more, my bad feelings were keeping me from doing the most important thing—standing back and figuring a way out of the situation. It took the humor, the joke of a friend to rouse me from my melancholy. The laugh helped me to not only feel better, but also see beyond the issue to begin figuring out how to solve the problem. And that was and still is huge. So I recommend that even in the most difficult of times press yourself to find something funny. The world is full of crazy, laughable things. You’ll get on all the better for it when you tap into humor in such times. I did and I am forever grateful to my friend for making the joke he did.

Recently humor became a focal point of another political imbroglio for possible presidential candidate, Joe Biden. The lead up to the joke was some individual women coming forth and telling their tales of discomfort and worry as a result of some of Biden’s physical contact with them. Biden has a well-known history of being physically affectionate or “handsy” and opinions vary as to the propriety of his behaviors. This post is not a way to weigh in on that particular controversy. I know far too little about the situations and the individuals involved. Further, I am not interested to evaluate his posted video response to controversy as a real or non-apology. I take no sides relative to those topics in this post. What I want to focus on is the joke he was heard to say at a union conference on Friday, April 5th, 2019. I want to explore how the joke worked or didn’t and attempt to explain why it did or it didn’t. Largely I think it failed to do as he wanted and this becomes a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to use humor to address controversy in the political realm or otherwise. The context and set-up for Biden’s joke is pretty clear. First, there is a controversy around his behaviors. Some individuals have explained their discomfort at some of his actions while others have not had the same responses. These issue come at a time when issues of personal space and violations thereof are being discussed more broadly and as a result of the #metoo movement. Women and others have become more comfortable raising their voices to show their particular situations and their responses to the acts. Powerful people from across a variety of societal realms have had allegations and charges brought upon them due to this increased awareness on issues regarding personal space and touching. Some have been brought to trials whereas others have faced little to no consquences. The specifics for Biden’s case fit directly into the overall cultural influences described and are in a sense emblematic of a particular cultural moment. The joke came as a result of his introduction to an electrical workers union where he hugged the individual introducing him, Lonnie Stephenson, a white male. I add those biographical bits, because as with most humor, context matters. The crowd was also largely white and male. As Biden began speaking he made a little joke, that “He had permission to hug Lonnie.” Laughs were had. But the joke did nothing but flame the fires of the controversy. It did nothing to put the issue at ease. Obviously Biden and his supporters would like this to all go away, and often, a well-timed and snappy bit of humor can cause an issue to evaporate. It worked for President Reagan when he fended off the worry about his age when he quipped he wouldn’t use the “youth and inexperience of his opponent against him.” As brilliant a line and move as that was, that was in debate where making points is expected and the venue is antagonistic. There was nothing like that here. Biden was campaigning, and he was campaigning during a time when issues of sexual harassment and such are forward in the cultural milieu. Age isn’t a character flaw, but touching people and making people ill at ease because of behavior might very well be. The former is what happens to us all, whereas the latter is behavior one can choose to or not to do. There are a couple of ways one could take his joke. One he was using the humor to indicate that he’s aware of the issue and will deal with it in a forthright manner. Another response is that he’s using the humor to try and cast aside the issue and in a sense say “It’s no big deal.” The danger in this approach is that it seems that he’s laughing off the issue indicating that he has a tin ear—that is, it’s not something he feels he needs to seriously address. He can also be taken to be joking about something that you just don’t make light of, especially in public and especially as a candidate who is to represent a large number of people, many of whom find this issue to be central and certainly not to be made light of. Being seen as insensitive and or unwilling to listen and understand is often problematic for political candidates. If part or the main of your job is to represent people, being unable or unwilling to hear and listen to folks, then this makes one unfit for the job. Biden did post a video attempting to address the issues which indicates that he is taking it seriously, but it seemingly fell flat. The problem with the joke, coupled with the video is that someone could conclude that Biden simply doesn’t really care about the complaints of the folks involved. He doesn’t make much of an attempt to deal with the thorny issue that women felt deeply uncomfortable with his actions even if he didn’t have creepier or lascivious intentions. And that seems to be the problem. Since he doesn’t deal with it, he doesn’t really think it’s a problem worth effort and attention. The fact that he jokes about the issue in the cavalier way that he does twice in the same venue, to a bunch of other men, reinforces that conclusion. Instead of using the joke to acknowledge the elephant in the room, he comes across as using the humor to try and make the issue seem less than important—something he needn’t talk about as an individual or a candidate. The historical silencing of voices of the abused is one of the reasons the #metoo movement has grown in the way that it has. The main problem with the joke as it relates to his political life is that it doesn’t help him. It seems at odds with his video apology that he is taking some parts of the issues raised against him seriously. What one would have hoped, or what I would have hoped if I had advised him to use humor, was that the joke would not detract from people’s perception that he was being serious about this issue and listening to people about it. This was not the effect had. In ending this, let me raise a couple of other points. I don’t know Biden, I don’t know his views of women. I have no idea the level of authenticity the man has given the words of apology he gave. I don’t know if he was being a calculated political operative when he made the joke he did, or if he was genuinely trying to use the joke to address the issue, but did so in a ham-handed way. Most of the rest of us opining on this likely do not either. So perhaps we need more information before we fasten our opinions. Perhaps we’ve all we need, or have all we’re gonna get. I don’t know. Another question I would ask anyone who finds his behavior lacking, is to describe what could he do that would be acceptable given the situation? How does he, or anyone, make this better? Politics is a strange, oft- irrational game, and very rarely does a politician issue a full apology. Maybe he should’ve started there rather than a joke. It would open up avenues for more voices to be heard and this seems to be in line with what we expect of those who represent us.

In a recent article, author Alison Green bemoans meetings and the negative effects they can and often have. They're too long. They wander aimlessly. They bog down in irrelevant minutiae. They're wastes of time. And that's not all! The short term results create frustration, disengagement, and boredom. A side benefit is that some people catch up on their social media feeds. The long term, and often more harmful effects of chronically bad meetings, is that the very idea of meetings becomes stressful and annoying. I have a colleague, who shall remain nameless, and whom I deeply respect, who can take a 30 minute meeting and turn it into a 90 minute one. While what my colleague has to say is generally relevant, and important, man, please wrap it up already! Meetings don't have to be awful and sometimes they're necessary. Even long meetings are good, because if we don't sometimes get down in the weeds and slog through the issues, we will end up paying for that avoidance later. So how can humor help with meetings? Can humor help us enjoy and get more from meetings? The unsurprising answer is yes. Let's look at some of the sins of bad meetings that Ms. Green elucidates. Meetings are disorganized, become proxies for social activities, meetings are univocal and unilateral. If one person is providing all the content, why not use email? Why set up a lecture session? We left college a long time ago. Other complaints about meetings include them being too long, people are late, or the meetings never add up to anything. That is, there is never a deliverable from the meeting, and hence one wonders what the goal of the meeting is. As someone who has run meetings in the past, and who's been complimented on the way I run meetings, I can say that humor is effective. But before that, as many of the articles you can read will say, organization is key. Why are we here? (and not in the existential sense) What's to be accomplished? What can we expect happens as a result of this meeting? My meetings were typically ones to bring the office staff together, talk a little bit, let people know what the other was doing and the challenges and successes had, what was on the horizon, and to communicate what some short and medium term projects were. I rarely had an agenda, but that became the default agenda for our regular meetings. It was set via repetition. I had a sense of what I wanted to do from the first meeting I did as the director, and set on about accomplishing it. One thing that I always asked when I began my meeting was if anyone had any interesting or funny stories to share. I do this in my classes as well. They could be funny-gripe stories, an "I heard that..." sort of thing, whatever. The point was to get everyone to feel as if they could speak about something not work-related. But also that they could speak up. I tried to always have a funny story from class at the ready. Not everyone chimed in, but the openness and warmth was appreciated. Make no mistake here, humor of the right sort makes people relax, engage, and feel good. Too much and the humor is contrived, but absent, it makes the folks disengaged. The sort of humor, in general, you should use in your meetings should be what's typically called inviting. That is, try not to be making fun of anyone directly, or ridicule anyone. That's not going to work in the long run. You can of course make fun of meetings. But if you do, be sure that your meeting violates what you're making fun of. It's a sort of call back, and it will help you be more organized in your meetings. So not only can humor help people warm up and feel engaged, it can act as a way to help you create a good meeting routine. Two birds, one joke! One of humor's under-appreciated aspects is that Ha-Ha and Ah-Ha rely on the same parts of the brain. Getting a joke is like solving a puzzle or making a discovery--and those are inherently rewarding. From experience, I can say that when I can find funny ways to exemplify a point in my college classes, the students generally remember the point better. Apply that to meetings where points or new information has to be made readily apparent and memorable. Wrap that point in a joke and people will remember it better. It will also cause you to think more about how to present that material more effectively. Again, two birds, one joke. If a meeting is going to run long, if there are a lot of details and chock full of information, everyone, even the most practiced of lecture-attending students loses focus and their attention fades. It's just how we are wired. I am not saying to put a joke or witticism in every 10-20 minutes (about the average time people can stay focused), but inserting something that will make them refocus will help overall. Try and say something in an unusual or witty way. I often refer to myself as the melanin challenged member of the class. I teach at an HBCU (historically black college or university). This will get a chuckle. I can't always use it, but the idea is there. Thinking hard about what you say and how you want to say it is important. There are yet more ways humor can help, but I might wait till next week to go into more depth. Have a good week and remember to smile a bit more.