Laugh your way to success
“It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” — “This is Spinal Tap” (1984) After “attractive,” few compliments are more universally welcomed than “funny.” But being deemed hilarious or witty is more than just a personality trait that can win you more friends. If used successfully, humor also can boost your status at work, persuading others that you’re both more confident and more competent than you may actually be, according to forthcoming research into the connection between status and humor. “If you are brave enough to tell the joke that you want to tell, whether it succeeds or not, people ascribe confidence to you because they see you as efficacious” for taking such a risk with all the ways a joke can potentially fail, said Alison Wood Brooks, assistant professor at Harvard Business School and the paper’s co-author. “To tell a successful joke does, in fact, take quite a lot of competence...