Do you leave your sense of humor at home?

I met a guy at a reception who only seems to be funny outside the building. Turns out, he's not alone.

Where does your sense of humor go when you walk into your office?

I don’t mean rhetorically. I mean literally. The version of you that makes your friends snort-laugh at dinner, drops the perfect line into the group chat, and laughs off the tension after accidentally trying to get into the wrong car for 5 minutes (totally not me yesterday...).

Where does that person live between 9 and 5?

Conversationally Funny

I’ve been thinking about that since a conversation I had at a reception a couple of weeks ago.

I’d just finished giving my Humor That Works keynote and was milling around the conference reception with a hot cup of tea I was drinking out of a wine glass because there were no mugs left.

While walking around, I met Brandon. He was easily the funniest person in the room. Quick, dry, perfectly timed. The kind of conversational humor that makes you want to keep talking just to see what he says next.

So at some point I asked him how he uses that humor at work. He said he didn’t.

I was surprised... but also not. He really didn’t bring humor into his job. When I asked why, he gave me an answer that I’ve heard time and time before.

He said during my keynote was the first time he’d ever considered humor as a thing he could, or should, do in the office. Nobody had told him not to so he’d never thought to bring “that side of himself” to work.

That’s the phrase that’s been sticking with me: “that side of himself.”

Like he was leaving an entire part of his personality, of who he is, at home.

There’s a lot of conversation these days about authenticity (especially in the world of AI). If you want to be authentic at work, humor has to be part of the equation. Because humor is part of who we are as humans.

But Brandon isn’t alone in leaving part of himself at home.

Is humor personal or professional?

I was recently going through the data from the Humor Intelligence Assessment and noticed that the vast majority of people sign up with a personal email address, not a work one.

There are probably some practical reasons. People check personal email more often. Corporate spam filters get suspicious of anything with the word “humor” in the subject line. You might be considering leaving your job soon but want to take some levity with you…

But I also think the email choice points to the same thing Brandon was pointing to. People file humor under “personal life.” It’s how they show up at receptions, with friends, in group chats. Not how they show up at the all-hands.

My journey into using humor at P&G was similar. As I shared in my first TEDx talk years ago, “No one ever told me to use humor at work but no one ever stopped me either. So I just... started.”

Brandon and I had the same blank slate. Same absence of explicit permission but also the same absence of explicit prohibition.

The only difference is I treated the silence as an opening, and he treated it as a closed door.

Most of us aren’t being held back by a rule. We’re being held back by a habit. The habit of deciding, without ever really thinking about it, which parts of ourselves get to come to work.

So this week, the question I’d leave you with is the same one I keep asking myself.

What part of you didn’t make it through the lobby this morning?

And what would change if it had?

Wit regards,

Andrew

P.S. If you want a structured way to see where your humor already shows up at work (and where it doesn’t yet), the Humor Intelligence Assessment is the closest thing I’ve built to a map. Takes about 5 minutes, and the questions tend to surprise people more than the score does.

P.P.S. Brandon, if you’re reading this, you have permission. Go be funny in your next meeting.