The Business Case for More Humour and Playfulness

There's a reason I've avoided the word "levity" in this title, even though it's in the name of one of my own workshops, The Levity Works.

Levity is a certain lightness or playfulness.

Levity sounds like something you're allowed, a permission slip, a nice-to-have once the real work is done. What the research actually shows is closer to the opposite.

These are not lessons in how to be funny. Nobody leaves one of my workshops as a comedian.

What they leave with is a process, the same one that stand-up comedians can run on, stripped down and applied to a completely different audience. Underneath all the material and all the nights on stage, the skills of a stand-up comedian break into two disciplines.

Generating the material. And delivering it.

The writing and the creativity versus the presentation, the pitch, the public speaking.

Everything a comedian does sits in one of those two categories, and so does almost everything a business, a team, or a person speaking one to many, a room of clients or colleagues, has to get right.

Should people also pick up more laughs than they’d expect from a typical L&D session, along with a sharper sense of their own communication, that is a welcome side effect, whichever of my workshops they choose.

Alice Isen’s research on creativity is still among the most cited in the field. She found that people who had just watched a few minutes of a comedy film solved a classic creativity test at three times the rate of people who hadn’t.

The specific trigger mattered less than the mild, safe lift in mood it created, which loosened the grip of the first, most obvious answer and made room for the second or third one, the one actually worth keeping.

Every good comedian understands this instinctively. The first thought, the obvious one, rarely has the hook or the surprise that an audience needs, so the better ones always go deeper, usually by coming at it from an unusual angle first.

“Be more creative” is advice nobody can act on, so what I teach is a repeatable process.

Finding that unusual premise, mining it properly rather than settling for the first pass, editing it down efficiently, then building it back up with fewer, better words, ideally with a hook that earns attention quickly and a finish that leaves them wanting more.

That process, blank page through to something worth saying out loud, is the focus of Developing Stronger Ideas.

Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo is a language and linguistics researcher, and while studying TED talks she identified three mechanisms doing the work when an audience is properly with a speaker.

Surprise, a fundamental of stand-up. A shared sense of superiority over the setup. And release, the tension of a moment finally breaking, usually where the delight arrives. In stand-up, that would be the laughter response.

None of this strictly requires a joke, but a version of setup and payoff nearly always sits underneath. Comedians are going for 'ha ha', but for non-stand-ups, 'aha' is the more potent goal.

What all three require is noticing what a room is feeling and giving it somewhere to go, which is most of what reading a room actually is. Leading one is the same skill run in reverse.

There is a technique underneath a lot of this, prepared spontaneity, which sounds like a contradiction and isn't. It's one of the most reliable ways to come across as quick-witted and present in the moment, when what's actually happening is that you're simply better prepared than almost everyone else.

This technique can be taught and repeated. Nerves before presenting are normal, and public speaking terrifies most people. Fast rapport changes the effect of everything that follows, and body language does a lot of that work. Knowing how to adjust mid-flow, and leave on a high rather than trail off, matters just as much.

These skills are what we work on in Confident Client Engagement.

Rod Martin, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario and the researcher behind the Humor Styles Questionnaire, the standard measure used across the field, draws a distinction most workplace advice flattens.

Not all humour helps under pressure. There's humour and there's inappropriate humour, and knowing which is which matters everywhere.

What Martin calls coping humour, using it deliberately to reframe a hard moment rather than avoid it, sometimes closer to what people call gallows humour, is linked to lower stress and better psychological adjustment over time. A separate study of firefighters found this kind of coping humour measurably buffered the psychological impact of traumatic incidents on the job.

Resilience gets taught as a mindset, grit, positive thinking, push through. What holds up under pressure is more specific.

How you set yourself up before a potentially hard call. What you actually do mid-call when it's going wrong, smartly checking in with yourself rather than white-knuckling it.

Then there’s what you do afterwards: catching a breath and assessing, so the last call doesn’t bleed into the next one.

Prepared before, aware during, reflective after. That's the entire spine of Bomb Proof: Sales Resilience Under Pressure.

Naomi Bagdonas, who lectures on humour at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, co-wrote the terrific "Humor, Seriously" with Jennifer Aaker, on using levity and playfulness deliberately at work.

Between them they make a distinction worth repeating to anyone nervous about this subject. We can do serious things without taking ourselves too seriously.

If in doubt, remember that a joke in a professional setting is almost always safer aimed at your own expense than someone else's.

Appropriate use matters more than the joke itself. Done well, self-deprecation has a charm of its own.

A 2024 Deakin University study adds the necessary caveat. Used well, humour signals confidence and can be developed as a skill.

Used badly, it signals the opposite.

In most workplaces, the objective is rarely a room full of laughter.

If laughter is marked out of ten, with ten being the funniest, then stand-ups routinely chase those ever-so-hard to achieve eights, nines and tens.

In a workplace, you're aiming for the far easier twos and threes.

Enough to raise a real smile, perhaps a small chuckle, to juice the social contract. There’s real value in being seen to respond warmly to humour, almost as much as in being the one bold enough to have a go.

That’s what bonds a team and builds resilience for harder times. It is the everyday version of everything above: a warmer baseline in how a team talks to each other and comes across to clients and prospects.

That ongoing shift is what The Levity Works is built around.

David Glew and Jessica Mesmer-Magnus of UNC Wilmington ran a meta-analysis pulling together a large body of workplace humour research.

It found a consistent pattern: shared humour correlates with stronger workgroup cohesion and better coping effectiveness.

NASA ran a stranger version of the same test, tracking small teams confined together for up to forty-five days in a simulated isolation environment, and found the same pattern held, positive humour increased how much team members trusted and liked each other.

An away day with more laughs in it than the average training day, and none of the usual trust falls or forced icebreakers, adds deliberate bonding on top of the lessons.

It’s the shared experience of a room learning together how to be more playful, and how to welcome playfulness in each other, that improves the learning.

Standalone, bespoke stand-up comedy shows for your organisation are covered here.

We can also bring a professional photographer to take portraits of your team, and one of the whole crew together.

That’s the case for Laugh and Learn Away Days: a full training day at a live comedy venue, a bespoke comedy show on its own, or both together.

Four workshops. Bomb Proof, Confident Client Engagement, and Developing Stronger Ideas are built for anyone dealing with people outside the company as much as within it.

The Levity Works turns the same principles inward, onto everyday internal culture.

Underneath all four sits the same two stand-up disciplines, generating the material, and delivering it.

In more than a thousand nights MCing live stand-up shows and over a hundred group workshops since, I've watched versions of these claims play out long before I had top-tier academic research to back it up.

Stanford, Wharton, Deakin and NASA's own human research programme have since caught up with them independently, different fields, different methods, same conclusion.

Little of this is really about being funny. It comes from what the stand-up stage teaches about capable people once an audience starts watching them, and about making sure what the audience sees matches what they can do, ideally with a smile, or at least a chuckle and some appreciation for the effort.

AI keeps getting more impressive, so it is worth holding onto what none of it can do. Spot the wonky pattern nobody else saw coming, and deliver it with a satisfying pay-off.

Look someone in the eye and mean it. Show the small human signals that tell another person you see them. Share a laugh or a smile, find a real common interest, and build on it.

Next to the harder skills, these are the ones that matter most.

If you want to see how this becomes an event for your team, have a look at what we do.

Do these workshops teach people how to be funny?
No. They teach the two underlying disciplines of stand-up comedy, developing material and delivering it, applied directly to business skills. Being a little funnier is a common side effect, not the goal.

Which workshop is right if my team struggles with confidence in client meetings?
Confident Client Engagement is built specifically around presence, rapport and reading a room under pressure, the delivery side of the two disciplines.

Is there research behind using humour and playfulness in learning and development?
Yes, spanning organisational psychology, creativity research and leadership studies, from institutions including Stanford, Wharton, Deakin University and NASA's own human research programme.

What's the difference between an away day and a Levity Works workshop?
An away day is a single, memorable shared experience built around a live comedy show, ideal for team bonding. The Levity Works is about building an ongoing, everyday habit of workplace playfulness rather than one event.