My sense of humor has a habit of showing up precisely when a situation has become professionally ridiculous. Which is fortunate, because some workdays arrive preloaded with enough tension to qualify for combat pay. This has kept many a bad moment from becoming the only thing in the room and, at least twice, kept me from saying what I was really thinking in a tone that would have required an HR intervention and an adult beverage.
I have noticed though, that people like me often get read incorrectly. A dry line in a tense moment can look careless to someone who has never needed humor for structural support. A dark joke can sound glib if you miss what it is doing underneath. But some of us are not making light of hard things. We are making them survivable enough to stay present.
That is a SKILL. Not stand-up comedy, but a real, usable SKILL.
The ability to read a room, feel the pressure rising, and find exactly enough distance to keep your mind working. The line lands, the air changes, and suddenly you can think again. The problem is still sitting with legs spread wide, but it is no longer taking up the whole couch.
And that SKILL borrows time from another SNAK in your pack, KNOWLEDGE.
PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE. The kind gathered the expensive way. You live long enough, work hard enough, recover from enough, and eventually you develop a very refined understanding of what tension feels like in your body, what absurdity looks like in real time, and how quickly a moment can go sideways if nobody opens a window. PROFESSONAL KNOWLEDGE too. You learn how to work in teams. You learn how to control your power and refine your timing. You learn when people need candor, steadiness, or one extremely well-placed sentence that says, with dignity, “well, this is a learning opportunity with teeth.”
That is why I think this matters in development conversations.
We talk a great deal about what people know and what they can do, which is fair, because those things matter. But sometimes the evidence is subtler. Sometimes it shows up in how a person metabolizes pressure without spraying it across the conference table. Sometimes it appears in the flash of wit that keeps a meeting human when the official script has wandered off into the woods.
So yes, I bring humor to the table on purpose. Not because everything is funny. Because some of us have learned, personally and professionally, that perspective is one of the few things that can cut tension without cutting people. And when it works, it tells us quite a lot about the SKILLS we have built and the KNOWLEDGE we have earned along the way.
So, tell us, when has humor helped your team stay human in the middle of something difficult?
