This Could Destroy the World!
Yesterday in the office I sometimes swan into when I’m not working from home, there was much hilarity. Loud guffaws of laughter were heard. Screams of mirth were piercing the air. At points it was startlingly loud. Clearly someone visiting the office was a bit of a joker, a character, or a “good laugh”.
At one point the laughter that erupted from the office this bloke was in was so uproarious that it prompted one of my colleagues to say this:
“Bloody Hell, that’s not even a corporate laugh. That’s an actual laugh”
I thought my friend’s comment was funny. So I laughed. A real laugh; not a corporate laugh.
I’ve been thinking about corporate laughing ever since. The social and business oil of the corporate laugh is a powerful force. The forced or fake laughing at the joke or the comment that someone makes, even though you don’t find it particularly funny, in order to make life go smoother, is the Castrol GTX of the global business machine.
I wonder what would happen if one day we all decided not to do the corporate laugh?
What would happen if everyone, one day, didn’t laugh at the lame comments a workmate makes about their weekend exploits, but instead just looked at them silently?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t laugh at all, but only genuine situations of hilarity should get any response.
A typical day would also involve not laughing at meetings or presentations where the boss tells a funny story to get everyone on board with something, makes remarks about fellow workmates, or generally just tries to show what a wag he is. Unless any of this was genuinely funny. Which in 99% of cases, it wouldn’t be.
We could widen the definition to extend to social occasions. For example, hopeful boyfriends meeting the girl’s parents for the first time would be banned from doing the corporate laugh. If the meeting of Dad-in-Law-To-Be fell on “No Corporate Laughing Day” they’d be screwed as they’d have to look Daddio unsmilingly in the eye as he tells all his mother-in-law jokes and expects a captive and generous audience in the form of the suck up future son in law who wants full approval.
Excepting the office of Gordon Brown which I’m guessing sees little in the way of joshing, the political machine would seize up. All that forced laughter and barracking in the House of Commons would cease and some actual progress might be made. Similarly the ass kissing laughter of the minions during a golf game with George Bush would result in shockwaves of indifference leaving the ego of the President battered, forcing him to do God Knows What.
Would all business deals fall flat? Would “office pranksters” find themselves facing a wall of silence provoking a crisis of self doubt? Would the psyche of the corporate drone be irrevocably damaged causing most of them to cease to function? Would the social grease of the day be wiped away, make us all anxious, disorientated and even angry?
Maybe even then I’m understating it: would a global war break out within one day of the no corporate laughing embargo???
Let’s try it and see what happens!
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