How to Use Humor at Work: Lessons From a Funny Job Ad Study

A new study out of Australia found that funny job ads can make a company look less fair. If you've been trying to figure out how to use humor at work, that's a useful thing to know, and it comes from the very first message a company ever sends a future employee.

The research was led by Associate Professor David Cheng at the Australian National University. According to ANU's announcement on Nov. 13, more than 750 job seekers looked at job ads modeled on real postings from sites like Seek.com.au. The humorous versions consistently made people think the employer was less likely to have fair and just HR processes. In some cases, people were less interested in applying at all.

I've been telling jokes for a living for over 20 years, and I run workshops teaching leaders to use humor on purpose. I'm on Team Funny, and I still think this study is right. It puts numbers on something I see every time a manager tells a joke to a room that doesn't trust them yet.

What did the funny job ad study find?

The paper, by Cheng, Miaojia Huang, Rajiv Amarnani, Alexander Eapen and Patrick Dunlop, appears in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment. The abstract describes three experiments. In the first two, humor made the job less attractive. In the third, it made no statistically significant difference either way. Across all three, people who read the humorous postings expected the organization to show lower levels of procedural justice, which is the academic way of saying "I don't trust you to treat me fairly."

There was one point in humor's favor. Phys.org's write-up notes some evidence that job seekers saw the funny organizations as friendlier. So the jokes did something. They made the company seem nice and a little unserious at the same time.

Cheng put it plainly in the ANU release: "Humour may help you stand out, but it doesn't necessarily translate to more people wanting to apply for your job." The research team, which included RMIT, the University of Western Australia and Curtin University, suggests employers think carefully before putting humor in recruitment ads.

Why would a joke make a company look unfair?

The authors frame it with two ideas, signaling theory and benign violation theory. Here's my comedian's translation: a joke breaks a small rule, and the reader has to decide whether that rule-breaking is harmless. In a job ad, the rules being broken are about the hiring process. Will they read my application? Will they pay me what they said? Will the interview be fair? When you're nervous about all of that, a wisecrack from the company can sound like the company isn't nervous about any of it.

Comedians learn this the hard way. When I walk on stage, the audience doesn't owe me a laugh. They're deciding in the first minute whether I know what I'm doing. If I open with my weirdest bit before they trust me, it dies. Same joke, 20 minutes later, after they've decided I'm in control? It kills.

That's the rule I teach most often about humor in leadership: humor only works where trust already exists. A job posting is the coldest room there is. The reader doesn't know you, has something real at stake, and is reading your words for clues about how you'll treat them. Being funny before you've shown you're fair asks them to trust you first.

Your employees are holding back their jokes, too

There's a second piece of data I keep coming back to. In a Monster survey of more than 1,000 U.S. workers, reported in March, 76% said they're less likely to joke around senior leadership. Sixty-nine percent said they sometimes hold back humor so they don't seem less professional or credible. And 57% admitted they've laughed at a joke they didn't find funny.

Put the two findings together and you get a pattern. People are reading humor as information about power. Who gets to joke? Who has to laugh? Is this place serious about the things that matter to me? Psychological safety at work means people feel they can speak up, or crack a joke, without it costing them something. A leader's humor can build that feeling or shut it down.

None of this means work should be humorless. The same survey found 96% of workers say laughter helps reduce stress and 95% say it helps them feel more connected to coworkers. People want to laugh at work. They just want to know the person in charge is taking them seriously first.

How to use humor at work after this study

Here's what I'd tell a hiring manager, an HR team or any leader who wants to be funny without looking careless:

• Keep the fairness parts dead serious. Pay, hours, requirements, how hiring decisions get made: write those like you mean them. Save the personality for what it's like to work there.
• Joke about yourself or the situation. Self-deprecation is the safest joke a leader has because nobody below you is the punchline. "Our coffee machine is older than some of our interns" is fine. Anything about the reader is not.
• Show the culture instead of announcing it. Dan Van Slambrook, writing for ASE about the same research, suggests humor may fit better in employer brand campaigns, recruiting videos and employee-generated content than in the posting that lists the job's requirements. I agree. A short video of your real team being funny says more than a pun in a bullet point.
• Earn it in the room. In meetings, let your team see you handle serious things well before you get playful. Approachable leadership comes from being reliable first and loose second.
• Test the line on someone who isn't like you. If a person outside your team reads it as dismissive, a nervous job seeker will too.

For more workplace humor examples, good and bad, see my breakdown of the "Ram Altman" name change, where a CEO used a joke well and then leaned on it too hard. And if you're hiring early-career people, read why Gen Z is losing the first rung; those are exactly the job seekers reading your ads most closely. Everything else lives under leadership humor.

This is the kind of judgment we practice in our corporate humor workshops: when a joke builds trust, when it spends trust you don't have yet, and how to tell which room you're in. If you'd rather show your culture than describe it, that's what our corporate comedy video production team does.

Funny job ads are a fine idea once your people already believe you'll treat them fairly, and I can help your leaders build that part.