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The purpose of the current study is to explain best practices for attempting humor in the workplace. Research on humor in the workplace has emphasized the use of leader humor but has neglected to provide guidance on how to successfully use humor. This is an important gap because unsuccessful humor attempts are associated with lowered status and disruptive behavior.

This paper summarizes three types of humor theories (i.e. cognitive, social and contextual) and derives principles from these theories that can be applied to improve humor success. Then, the authors apply the understanding of humor to workplace applications, providing suggestions for future empirical research inferred from the humor theories.

Humor attempts are most likely to land (i.e. invoke mirth) when they include a benign violation of mental schemas, societal norms or other expectations or when humor evokes shared feelings of benign superiority in the audience. Humor is less effective in goal-directed situations. Mirth is expected to increase group cohesion, leader trust and organizational identification and mitigate the effects of job stressors. Finally, employee learning and development activities (e.g. onboarding, training) seem like a good place to use humor to facilitate cognitive flexibility.

These suggestions from across psychological disciplines are synthesized to inform best practices for leader humor.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the communicative constitution of organizational inclusion and/or exclusion through humorous acts at the expense of members of minorities and/or historically disadvantaged groups.

Semistructured interviews with 84 employees in Austria and Germany dealing with their experiences regarding diversity and inclusion (D&I) at work were conducted and analyzed in two steps. First, a thematic text analysis was performed to structure the content and identify relevant themes and anecdotes for further analysis. Second, a ventriloquial analysis sought to identify the physically absent yet present voices in these anecdotes.

The interviews revealed that jokes and quips mostly target colleagues of observable foreign origin. The analysis further identified three themes that show that disparaging humor can simultaneously reinforce inclusion/exclusion across hierarchies and create boundaries within teams – but in different ways. The findings also indicate that above all prejudices “participate” in such events and that in most cases the collective is invoked to increase the joke's “authority”.

This research is the first one that investigates humor in the context of D&I through a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) lens, which facilitates studying the constitutive character of humorous communication in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, this is one of the first empirical humor studies to draw on established theory-driven concepts of inclusion-exclusion in its analysis.

Humour and, in particular, jokes have received little serious academic scrutiny in the entrepreneurship literature to date. To address this, the purpose of this paper is to examine publicly available jokes about entrepreneurs to establish what such jokes tell us about how humour, particularly entrepreneur jokes shapes public perceptions of entrepreneurial identity. This is important because humour may be an integral part of an individual's entrepreneurial identity. The authors thus contribute to understandings of the complex nature of entrepreneurial identity and how public perceptions of humour influence such by encapsulating negative public perception of entrepreneurs which may act as a de-legitimisation mechanism.

From a representative sample of entrepreneur jokes located on the web using netnographic techniques, the authors apply a multi-disciplinary framework to analyse the material and its messages to establish how such jokes shape public perceptions.

The findings suggest that jokes convey a pejorative message about how entrepreneurs are perceived by the public with the content and message of the jokes being negative and derogatory. Common themes contained in the punchlines include – criminality, greed, dishonesty, hubris, stupidity, misfortune, ridicule and deviousness – all of which may de-legitimise generic entrepreneurial identity. In the process, the authors uncovered liminal aspects of joke telling and consumption in that the perception of jokes about entrepreneurs relate to the time and context in which the joke is told given that situational cleverness is a key facet of such jokes. In addition, the authors discuss variations across jokes.

The authors discuss learning outcomes for future research and potential future studies into humour in an entrepreneurial context.

This study places humour and joking on the research stage, making an incremental contribution. The authors add to the literature on the use of entrepreneurial humour and in particular in relation to how jokes influence public perception of entrepreneurs. From the data collected, the authors develop some fresh insights into the variation and range of entrepreneurship related jokes accessible online.

This study aims to use the ego depletion theory to examine the impact of hindrance stressors on knowledge sharing behaviors by investigating the mediating role of ego depletion and the moderating role of self-enhancing humor.

Data were obtained from a two-wave sample of 226 dyads, including employees in the manufacturing industry and their direct supervisors. The hypotheses were tested by hierarchical regression analyzes and Hayes’ PROCESS macro.

The results demonstrated that employees’ self-enhancing humor style could alleviate the impact of hindrance stressors on employees’ ego depletion state and buffer the negative indirect effect of hindrance stressors on employees’ knowledge-sharing behaviors.

Although the authors collected mediator and dependent variables from different sources, this study used a cross-sectional research design, making it difficult to draw causal conclusions. Besides, hindrance stressors, ego depletion and self-enhancing humor style were all reported by employees.

Through the study, the authors highlight the important role of the self-control view in explaining proactive behavior in the workplace and a great awareness of the unforeseeable consequences of ego depletion for employees.

According to thesaurus definitions, the absurd translates as “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous”; “extremely silly; not logical and sensible”. As further indicated in the Latin root absurdus, “out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous,” humor in absurd registers plays with that which is out of harmony with both reason and decency. In this article, the authors make an argument for the absurd as a feminist method for tackling heterosexism.

By focusing on the Twitter account “Men Write Women” (est. 2019), the rationale of which is to share literary excerpts from male authors describing women's experiences, thoughts and appearances, and which regularly broadens into social theater in the user reactions, the study explores the critical value of absurdity in feminist social media tactics.

The study proposes the absurd as a means of not merely turning things around, or inside out, but disrupting and eschewing the hegemonic logic on offer. While both absurd humor and feminist activism may begin from a site of reactivity and negative evaluation, it need not remain confined to it. Rather, by turning things preposterous, ludicrous and inappropriate, absurd laughter ends up somewhere different. The feminist value of absurd humor has to do with both its critical edge and with the affective lifts and spaces of ambiguity that it allows for.

Research on digital feminist activism has largely focused on the affective dynamics of anger. As there are multiple affective responses to sexism, our article foregrounds laughter and ambivalence as a means of claiming space differently in online cultures rife with hate, sexism and misogyny.

This study aims to examine the different effects that the fear and humor appeals in anti-smoking advertisements for children have on their affective reactions to the advertisements, on their beliefs about smoking and on their behavioral intentions to smoke.

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research study conducted in Italy with children aged from 8 to 11 years.

The results indicated that the humor appeal is a useful method for conveying a social theme in a pleasant way and creating a likable character that becomes an example for children to imitate; however, it is necessary to employ the fear appeal to make children reflect carefully about the negative consequences of smoking.

This study examined only children's behavioral intentions derived from anti-smoking advertisements, but future research should also examine their real behaviors after a period following repeated viewing of public service announcements about smoking prevention or other social issues.

Understanding how different types of appeals can influence children represents an important result for the prevention of youth smoking and the promotion of healthy lifestyle habits during childhood.

Understanding how different types of appeals can influence children represents an important result for the prevention of youth smoking and the promotion of healthy lifestyle habits during childhood.

Few studies have examined the impact of social advertisements on children, and particularly little is known about the effectiveness of fear appeals on this group.