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Humor and status have always been tightly linked: good leaders seem to often use humor in order to motivate their team members' actions. As individuals, we tend to prefer, researchers claim, jokes that make us laugh while feeling slightly uncomfortable.

Furthermore, we perceive the joke te...

• Take up more space: this signals that you are not afraid to take control on a physical level and it shows increased confidence.
• Laugh with the group: if you laugh with it, it goes away in most cases.
• Double down on the joke: amplifying the joke puts you in control of the s...

In his book Rhetoric, Aristotle has analyzed what a joke is: Creating an expectation and then breaking it.

“What’s the best thing about Switzerland?”
“I don’t know, but the flag’s a big plus.”

This joke builds an expectation in the fir...