Woke is a Bad Joke

Why the office has gotten less funny

I recently got this long email titled “A serious treatment of low-quality office humor.” Reprinted anonymously with the sender’s permission.

---

Bryan,

I had never taken time to flesh out this line of thinking prior, but bits and pieces have been incubating in my head throughout my early career as I’ve sat through HR trainings and as I’ve done my best to adhere to the advice “better to be unfunny than unemployed.”

In any event, as it relates to themes I’ve heard you frequently share regarding office romance and other risk-reward calculations in office settings that lead to sterile workplaces, I thought I would share.

The central premise is this: we can understand the decision of whether or not to make a joke with a basic model of expected value where:

Expected Value = (Likelihood of successful joke * Value of successful joke) – (Likelihood of unintentionally causing offense * Cost of offense). 

This calculation is inherent to humor because it’s an artform that thrives at the borderlands between appropriate and offensive. From this model, there are some basic insights and extensions that emerge.

1) The cost of offense is much higher in a workplace than among friends — e.g., whereas I value telling a funny joke at about $10/joke, I hate offending friends to the tune of $40/offense. So attempt the bit if probability exceeds 80%.

1a) But a joke gone very wrong at the office can trigger being fired, which is worth about negative $500,000 (more than my salary, as prospective employers lose interest when they reference check me). Now I need odds of 50,000:1 to go for it.

1b) Obviously, this cost scales up with compensation, so you should expect people higher in a company’s org chart to be even less funny as they face steeper Becker-style efficiency wages. That seems empirically true.

1c) Conversely, many entry level non-corporate staff seem to engage in lots more dangerous humor. That’s a rational response to having less to lose. 

2) Workplace environments usually feature more diversity than one’s friend group — across age, gender, ideology, etc. — which means the risk of the same joke going wrong among colleagues is higher than among friends, as norm heterogeneity broadens the risk surface.

2a) You should expect more diverse workplaces to be less funny. Illustratively, how many jokes would still be safe or even work if you made sure to add a devout Evangelical, an antiracist, a couple Gen Z'ers and some Boomers nearing retirement to the audience?

2b) When workplaces first diversify, you should expect a bump in HR-mediated instances of offense leading to reprimands followed by a glide towards an equilibrium where old employees settle into the new normal of humor hesitancy.

2c) A natural phenomenon that often plays out is when one relatively homogeneous group in a workplace tells a joke that’s funny among its subgroup but offensive to the broader group gets leaked, and a scandal erupts. This is the phenomenon of a joke told among the mostly white male board members becoming a black eye for the company — think Ariana Huffington arriving at Uber.

3) In theory HR has the power to save humor for the workplace. By explicitly naming the small, finite set of behaviors and jokes that can get you fired, employees can rest easy that e.g., as long as they don’t say X, Y, or Z they won’t get fired no matter how much offense another stakeholder takes to the conversation. 

3a) Of course, HR usually does the opposite by emphasizing such slogans as "Intent doesn't matter!"

3b) The problem is that there are external actors who have power to punish the company (the EEOC, customers who can boycott the company, lawmakers who want to make an example of a company, and employees who can threaten to quit en masse if a controversial figure remains) and these players all act with separate, tacit “I know it when I see it” rubrics for identifying and punishing problematic behavior.

3bi) This surprising backlash often catches corporate, including HR, off-guard. In those situations, the profit-maximizing strategy for most companies is to feed the unintentionally offending party to the wolves and spare the company from collateral reputational damage — think Google firing the engineer playing armchair gender theorist.

3c) As such, the rational response to HR training — after they lead you through example after example where you usually see the problem but occasionally don't until they explain how the situation is counterintuitively offensive — is to act more small-C conservatively. 

3d) Some hate HR for this. But in truth, HR is giving the best advice possible amidst genuinely unknown and dangerous territory. 

4) Framing humor in terms of risk, and overlaying gender differences in risk tolerance, you should expect more men to tell jokes in all environments (regardless of risk level) than women even if women are just as funny or funnier than men. 

4a) By introspection and observation, I think that extends to humor with negative expected value — as it does seem more men get canceled than women, and while it's hard to prove from ex post outcomes, it does seem like a lot of the humor is such that almost anyone should've known ex ante would have large downside risk.

Your comments in The Case Against Education about locked-in syndrome resonate with me here. For reasons that span trying to keep diverse employees and customers from negative-sum conflict and trying to minimize risk of lawsuit and discretionary legislator retaliation, companies' profit-maximizing strategy is to clamp down heavily on humor. And employees, facing massive downside risks, respond by sticking to milquetoast humor except when among trusted, homogeneous, small subgroups whose norms they know well. Unfortunately, this feels like a very stable equilibrium.

All the best, [redacted]