The great corporate laughter challenge

It was a brief communication from the HR department that set the cat among the pigeons. It has been observed, the mail said, that while our executives go about their duties with the diligence expected, they are lacking in spirit and visible enthusiasm. They don’t seem to be enjoying what they are doing. Such mail, in times gone by, would have been deftly parried with a response which profusely thanked the sender, and stated that the matter would be resolved asap. It would then be forwarded to multiple addressees and re-forwarded to many more until it was inextricably lost in corporate ether. Not a pigeon would then have fluttered.

But the current times were far from ordinary. An unsmiling face, while being un-aesthetic in itself, did not align with the organisation’s goal of being known as a wonderful place to work. Also, work-life equilibrium, a hot button issue, was now being debated by prime-time pundits who hailed frivolity as a powerful, if little-used, productivity tool.

Truth be told, we had been getting along quite well before that mail dropped into our inbox. Quite apart from the boss’s jokes which are universally found funny, good-natured banter usually reigned around water-coolers and breakout rooms. Every afternoon, the cafeteria would come alive with young techies pulling each other’s legs. Even greying veterans — the crusty old guard — was not above offering one liners and fun liners when they got into the mood.

Joke-and-dagger

But in HR’s eyes, these were islands of fun amid an ocean of dreary routine, and clearly not adequate. Like justice, it was not enough that a congenial atmosphere prevailed, it had to be seen to prevail. Our stealthy joke-and-dagger operations would, therefore, need to be replicated in the glare of the quadrangle, obvious even to the hurried visitor. The boss too bought into the idea that injecting humour into the everyday agenda would spark employee creativity and improve morale. She rose to the occasion by assuring HR that she would go many steps further than their prescriptions — she wouldn’t just get people to smile, she would make them laugh heartily. The operation got itself a codename — Ha Ha Happenings!

A raft of activities was planned — from commissioning a stand-up comedian, to sticking off-beat posters on the walls, and organising a Friday afternoon session titled “Tickle aur Pickle”. Buoyed by the occasion, enthusiasts proposed a skit that would parody our response to current developments such as AI and the more befuddling AQI. Everything went without a hitch until ideas entered implementation phase.

Suddenly, the project bristled with unexpected problems Finding a stand-up artiste suitable for corporate audiences was like finding a diamond in the Deonar dump yard because for most contemporary comedians, expletives came more readily than punctuations. And then, the spectre of political correctness reared its head. When we got down to it, there seemed to be a severe drought of subjects that you could joke about and live to tell the tale. Even the celebrated R.K. Laxman in his later years had said that his ‘Common Man’ was afraid to laugh in case someone got offended. If even the legend had found the going tough, what chance did we stand!

Soon, even its most ardent supporters conceded that the project had not lived up to its billing. Audiences initially drawn by curiosity soon stopped attending. Those who did laugh at the jokes did so out of deference rather than delight. At the end, we discovered a profound truth — you cannot mainstream what flourishes best on the margins, and when humour is institutionalised, it stops being fun.

The only happy postscript was that the laughter campaign itself became the subject of a million memes. A veteran who had seen corporate trends ebb and flow, summed it up, saying “it’s time to bid ta-ta to ha-ha”. As usual, the old guard had the last laugh.

jairam.menon@gmail.com