Honing the Delivery

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 teller as a self-confident person, who could easily become a leader due to his or her courage to make such a joke. The key point here is that the joke should be appropriate and match the context.

Making inside jokes usually shows how bounded a team or a group is: their jokes can understood the best by themselves.

However, the moment an outsider integrates the group, it is better to avoid the inside jokes, as this will most probably make him or her feel out of place.

• The wrong joke at the wrong time. It can make your brand look amateurish and unprofessional.
• If people think you’re cracking jokes for the sole purpose of getting more attention, you’ll be seen as exploitative rather than funny.
• Humor can cheapen certain ideas or make them be taken less seriously.
• In some cases, humor can be outright offensive.

• Humorous touches can almost always improve a piece that is already valuable on its own.
• If you’re sure a joke is going to land, it can make an effective advertisement. Test variations of the joke with a small audience first; that way, you can be sure the humor doesn’t cross a line.
• Brand differentiation. For example, Oreo has long differentiated itself by offering a quirky, tongue-in-cheek voice across its social media platforms. This is especially effective in dry, or otherwise “boring” industries.
• Personal branding. Elon Musk, for example, has separated himself from his companies Tesla and SpaceX by cracking jokes and roasting people on his own account.

• Humorous information receives increased attention during the perception stage.
• Improved encoding. Our brain gives preferential treatment to humorous information when it comes to storing it in our memory.
• The use of humor serves as a distraction from negative emotions, such as anger or anxiety, that people might experience when processing certain information.
• Reading or viewing something humorous has a positive and energizing effect.
• Adding humor to the information that you are presenting can make it more interesting to others.

The use of positive, nonaggressive humor is associated with 

• improved learning outcomes, 
• a relaxed learning environment, 
• better student evaluations, 
• an increased motivation to learn, 
• improved information recall, 
• an increased degree of student satisfaction throughout the learning process.

The use of negative or aggressive humor, especially if aimed at particular students, will produce the opposite effect.