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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Stand-up comics have to be just about the bravest people around.

If you’re a singer and the audience doesn’t enjoy your performance, you can blame the composer, the arranger, or your backup band.

If you’re an actor you can blame the script, the director, or the other actors in your show.

But if you’re a stand-up comic, it’s just you and the audience. They either laugh or they don’t. If they don’t, you’re up there with your bare face hanging out, soaked in flop sweat and with nowhere to hide.

We’ve been talking about political correctness and its impact on the workplace the last couple of weeks (“Polite-ical correctness,” 4/4/2016 and “It’s my turn to be the victim!” 4/11/2016). But so far we’ve barely touched on the most important dimension of the issue: Humor.

As a leader and manager you aren’t paid to be a comedian. You are paid to, among other things, create a healthy work environment.

What makes a work environment healthy? First and foremost, nobody in the workforce should feel threatened or harassed.

The law (as I understand it; I did lead HR once upon a time but I’m not an attorney) makes allowances for reasonability. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays. That doesn’t mean your other employees can’t celebrate birthdays. It does mean no one should pressure their co-worker to join the festivities.

But being unthreatening and unharassing doesn’t make a workforce healthy, any more than not having a fever and rash means you’re feeling fine. A manager who considers this an achievement needs to set the bar a wee bit higher.

This is where humor comes in. In my experience, in healthy work environments employees kid around — something that’s awfully hard to do without humor being involved.

Humor being what it is, though, kidding doesn’t always turn out to be funny. But then, there are no level-of-humor benchmarks you can draw on to determine the absolute level of funniness of a given wisecrack.

If the worst that happens is that nobody laughs, you’ll have an employee with newfound empathy for what stand-up comics risk at a professional level, except that all your employee has to say is, “Well, I thought it was funny,” and everyone moves on.

But there’s precious little in the way of kidding around that doesn’t risk offending someone, for several reasons the kidder has no control over.

The first has to do with DNA: Some people just weren’t born with the sense of humor gene. Strangely, the Americans with Disabilities Act ignores this syndrome and big pharma has yet to develop a treatment. It’s too bad, because the afflicted sometimes take offense at a remark specifically because their understanding of humor is, at best, theoretical.

The second reason is obliviosity. Congenital wisecrackers can be oblivious, more focused on eliciting a smile, guffaw, or something in between than on how what they’re about to say might offend a listener.

The third is the legitimate piece of what those who complain about political correctness are griping about — as a society we’re encouraging people to feel victimized, causing everyone to tip-toe around everyone else.

But as Offense-O-Meters are no more commercially available than level-of-humor benchmarks, it isn’t up to you or anyone else to tell an employee who’s feeling offended that he or she is wrong.

So what, as a business leader, do you do?

HR “best practice” says you play it safe. If there’s kidding, banter, jibes, or repartee, discourage it.

This will keep you out of trouble and the company out of court. It will also kill team performance. Teamwork depends on trust. Stop the joking around and you’ll pretty much wipe out the interpersonal relationship-building that trust depends on.

Or, you can establish a more relaxed atmosphere, with give-and-take and all the good-humored wordplay that goes with it.

And if someone does take offense? At the risk of horrifying your average HR professional:

Meet privately with the offended party (call him “Jim”). Explain that he has four alternatives.

The first: File a complaint with Human Resources. That’s his right and he’ll get a fair hearing with no retribution later on.

Second: Explain to the offender (call her “Jane”) that she was offensive, and why. If Jim chooses that course of action, you’ll be happy to mediate if he’d like.

Third: If Jim isn’t comfortable talking to the offender, you can have a quiet word with her instead.

Fourth: Jim can shrug it off and decide it isn’t worth making a fuss about.

So long as you’re completely neutral as to which alternative you’d prefer, you should stay out of trouble.

Just, whatever you do, don’t make a joke out of it.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Political correctness and common sense have something in common.

No, it isn’t that opposing political correctness is just common sense. What they share is argument by assertion. Once you say something is just common sense (or, as political speechwriters are wont to do these days, to apply the adjective “commonsense” to whatever preposterous proposition their employer is promoting that day) … once you use the phrase you’ve eliminated the need for evidence or logic. Like placing “Q.E.D.” at the end of a geometric proof, you have no more ‘splainin’ to do.

Complaining about political correctness is like that too. Make the complaint and there’s no room for further discussion.

And yet, there’s little about politically correctness that’s cut and dried, except, perhaps, for both extremes of the linguistic spectrum. For example, very few of us favor casual use of racial or ethnic slurs. But how about:

  • Quite a few years ago now, David Howard, then head of the Washington DC Office of Public Advocate, used the word “niggardly” in a conversation about funding.

It’s a perfectly fine word, with a precise, appropriate meaning and a clean and wholesome etymology. Nonetheless, Howard was forced to resign for using it because he should have known he might be misunderstood.

My guess: The people who criticized him were a bunch of Homo sapiens.

  • Huckleberry Finn. This was Mark Twain’s magnum opus against racism. In it, Nigger Jim (you have no idea how hard it was for me to even type his name) is a more sympathetic character than most of the upstanding white citizens in the book.

And in one of the truly brilliant bits in the history of satire, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer wrestle with their consciences, and finally decide to do the morally wrong thing. They hide their friend from those who would return him to slavery, even though they knew they’d surely go to Hell for it.

Every so often some well-intentioned souls want to ban this, one of the most important works in the history of American race relations, from school bookshelves, mostly because of its authentic vernacular. One suspects they’re ignorant of earlier attempts to ban the book … yes, that’s right, by those who considered it anti-Southern and who complained that it encouraged sympathy for escaped slaves.

  • Blazing Saddles, one of the funniest movies ever, with a powerful message about bigotry, too. Mel Brooks has his cast use the n-word and other racial and ethnic slurs so often and so casually audiences eventually become desensitized to the language.

It’s hard to see how Brooks could have written the script any other way, and the language is, to my way of thinking at least, pitch-perfect for its era and purpose. If you disagree, try re-writing the movie’s punchline in more sensitive language — the line where Rock Ridge’s mayor, called on to be fully inclusive, declines, saying, “We’ll take the Niggers and the Chinks, but we don’t want the Irish!”

(Plot spoiler: Cleavon Little persuades the townsfolk to accept the Irish, too.)

And now, to blur things even more, we have micro-aggression — defined as speech that falls short of overt bigotry but that still subtly demeans or stereotypes members of an already-marginalized group.

I have no doubt micro-aggression is real. For example I recall squirming when a saleswoman told my wife and me a dining room table we liked was made of “Coolie wood,” entirely oblivious to what she was saying.

For that matter I cringe when I hear people tossing off demeaning workplace words and phrases like geek, bean-counter, and pointy-haired boss. None of these is likely to cause an IT professional, accountant, or business manager to burst into tears. Language does shape attitudes, though. And stereotypes guide and reinforce expectations.

On the other hand, there’s no easy line that separates the hyenas’ ghetto-speak in Disney’s The Lion King from the Lucky Charms leprechaun’s stage Irish.

So let’s just lose the phrase “politically correct” altogether. It adds nothing and obscures lots. We don’t need to stamp anything out. We do need to find the line that separates patently offensive speech from listening with paper-thin skins. This sure would be handy, because avoiding offense shouldn’t lead us all to just give up and sew our collective lips together.

What it won’t be is easy. It isn’t, that is, just a matter of … dare I say it? … common sense.

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