 Well, most of us enjoy humour in the workplace and the benefits we have is that it brings a warmth, an inclusion, a collegiality to the workplace. It can break up the boredom of a long hard day. It diffuses tension among groups of people. It can help people who are a little bit different to be included if they can share a joke and it can allow managers to say face sometimes and it also allows workers to sometimes challenge managers in a joking way that's not so threatening. Humour is edgier than fun. Fun has got that safe element. It's quite wholesome usually in the workplace. It's like play. It's light-hearted as part of its definition whereas humour has the dark biting side. It's a little bit risky and it's naughty. We use humour to bring out some of our things that we're not really allowed to say so it has that edge to it and the edgier and riskier it is, the funnier it is. So humour is difficult. It's risky and funny but can we get away with saying that? Sometimes we do depending on who's around us in the context and sometimes we can't. Fun stays very PC at work. People arrange fun activities that are careful but humour happens more in the moment. It's more spontaneous so you get that edge to it and that definite possibility that it just might all go horribly wrong. A good example is our Prime Minister made an off the cuff quip about someone who was in the media for a crime and he made that quick quip in the moment and it went horribly wrong and he was forced to apologise and it wasn't something he should have been light-hearted about. Now he did that very spontaneously, very quickly, probably didn't even think about it and then paid the price afterwards and that's what humour is all about. Sometimes it's that very momentary, spontaneous quip that can get you into a bit of trouble when you look back on it. And in my research I was in a law firm that started a very safe piece of humour about being politically correct PC and a very nice older gentleman started this piece of humour saying the world has gone mad, PC must be eradicated, I am the PC eradicator. Now he put this in an email and sent it round the staff with a very light-hearted approach. Unfortunately people added to it and this piece of humour got a little bit out of hand and started talking about the lesbian cartel that runs our country and that was deemed a bit inappropriate but everyone still loved and everyone thought it was funny while it stayed inside the law firm. But in email it gets out there. Three or four people sent that email out to partners and then the email got dispersed. So the next step was that email with all its content got published in a national publication naming the law firm and naming the gentleman who had started it and attributing all of the remarks to him. So my research has shown that a boundary is constructed, it's socially constructed within a workplace. It's not something we sit down and have a strategic meeting about where our boundaries to humour but it's something that everyone over time just understands where the boundaries are. So they construct them together and people just intuitively know. So a new person has trouble, they have to decode this, they have to work out where that boundary sits and as a new person it's quite difficult to join the humour until you understand what the boundaries are for that particular company that group of people that context it's very contextual. The people making the jokes I like to call them the jokers they are really good at pushing those boundaries out a little bit but they understand very well where the boundaries are. They push them and because they're good at humour and they understand the context well they are the ones who can push it. There are a group of people I like to call the gatekeepers and they're the ones that bring them back in again. They will say hey you've gone a bit far. I had a wonderful woman in a law firm who said keep the party clean chaps keep the party clean and and brought the boundary back in when she thought humour had crossed the line a bit. So it's all about where this boundary sits and in very formal companies the boundaries are much safer much more constricted so that comes down to company culture in a more informal small company typical of what you might find in New Zealand workplaces those boundaries can be a bit wider because people know each other a lot better. But one of the signs of humour is laughter and we assume that laughter means everyone's enjoyed the humour but laughter is very contagious again very contextual people get swept up in it and sometimes people laugh even though they're finding the humour offensive it's very hard to be that person who is standing there not laughing so people will laugh along and therefore the joker assumes everyone likes that humour everyone's enjoying it but sometimes the laughter is embarrassed laughter or just I'm laughing along with everyone else it doesn't mean that everybody's enjoyed that humour and then afterwards you might get a complaint that joke went across the line that was an inappropriate joke it made me uncomfortable even though that person laughed with the group because it's very difficult not to laugh. So humour is complex and at work it's it's even more complex so it can be wonderful it can be warm we need humour we need it to get through our day but sometimes it goes horribly wrong and my advice is when it does go wrong be willing to apologise.