Watch any M.A.S.H. rerun. People in a ghastly work environment using craziness to stay sane and to cope. Maybe we liked the show because we've all had ghastly assignments and vicariously delighted in watching (even fictional) folk cope.
Larry Babb

Humor helps people relax and makes them more receptive to new thoughts flowing through. The barriers go down, flow of thought goes up. It's the connections people make that is the real learning.
Linda Willis

I regularly do workshops for staff training and development. At the beginning of my sessions, I share one of my mantras of life--If you can't have fun, why bother. I feel that humor is one of the great equalizers. If people can see me laughing (both at situations and also at myself), it really seems to break down barriers and open people's minds and their hearts.
Becky Christianson

The most effective learning is an intensely emotional event. For example, I once watched as two fast cars traveling in different directions tried to beat a red light. They met head on. One of the drivers flew through the windshield, hit his head on a lamppost, and was dead by the time he hit the ground. This was an unforgettable lesson in using a seat belt.

Great learning programs touch the heart as well as the head. Excitement, anger, happiness, and other intense emotions can be used to capture attention and tap into the learner's capacity to store episodic memories. Humor also helps build relationships quickly by exposing the foibles of the human condition. Of course, the humor must be appropriate and presented in a way that does not detract from the learning message.
David Owens

I was intrigued by your question. I was the manager of a 300-person service unit in a Fortune 100 Company for a number of years before recently retiring. Earlier in my career I took myself and every challenge very seriously. As I grew older I began to see the cyclic nature of changes in organizations, and I began to see the humor in how each new generation of leader (including me) would search for solutions to organizational problems by reorganizing.

Gradually I began to see the humor in more and more of what we tried to do, primarily when we focused on looking good as opposed to trying to actually be good. Rarely did we ever get a good view of the entire system that would have allowed us to make lasting impactful changes. I laugh now, but I should have been reading Ackoff for the last 35 years instead of the last 3.5!

Now, on to your question: I think humor supports learning in a broad spectrum of ways. Perhaps the most important is that since learning is usually limited by our egos (we think we already know, or we are trapped because we can't publicly admit we don't--thus we can't learn more), more learning is likely when we can actually admit and laugh at our own failures. Laughing at ourselves is a very effective way of relieving the stress of having to admit mistakes. This is an especially critical trait for an organization's leaders at all levels. A culture in which the leaders model and promote this behavior could have a deeper competitive advantage of learning faster.

This behavior increases the chances of us taking the critical steps of reflecting on what happened, acknowledging specifically when and how we could have done better, and then taking corrective action. Large egos and the usual accompanying lack of humor get in the way of the learning cycle, steps of reflection, acknowledgement, and correction. This is much worse in teams or whole organizations, where one must admit mistakes or failures to large groups in order to take the learning cycle steps; and without them the organization is stuck in the no-learning mode.

More humor can help; it is important, but not sufficient. A workplace full of humor that fails to take the critical learning cycle steps won't be any better off. So, let's promote humor and any other behaviors that make individual and organizational learning fun.
H.F. (Herb) Wimmer

I interpret use of humor in organizations according to R. R. Blake and J. S. Mouton's Managerial Grid styles. Production-only oriented leaders that neglect social relationships often use sarcastic humor to increase their control over subordinates or colleagues. At the other extreme, those who worry exclusively about relationships at the expense of production use humor to avoid conflict.

The best use is by what Blake and Mouton call the 9,9 leader, a team-oriented person who seeks consensus and strives for both high production and optimal relationships among subordinates and colleagues. In this case, humor contributes to these dual goals by bringing about openness in team situations. Up until the moment of humor's use, the team situation may be characterized by conflict and win/lose dynamics. Not only can humor open up such moments to dialogue, it also clarifies by its lucid comprehension of the problem what is really at stake in terms of systemic relations. The unexpectedness of these systemic interrelationships is what makes the dilemma at hand funny; its humor points the way toward solutions.
James Jackson Griffith

Here is a way that I have used humor for self-understanding and mastery:

No one really likes to own up to his/her foibles in front of a group of colleagues. It is precisely those things about ourselves that we most need to change that we find the most difficult to acknowledge. And if we can't acknowledge them, then we are still not dis-identifying from them. If we can't acknowledge these patterns, we can't "witness" them and they continue to run our lives. It is a catch-22, which humor can help break.

The process I describe here is a group process, but can be used one-on-one as well. I bring a group a collection of cartoons--maybe 25 or 30--which depict patterns of thinking and behaving that get in the way of ______ (fill in the blank, depending on what the group is working on). Everyone gets a packet.

Then everyone chooses a few cartoons in which they see themselves. The process is confidential. Selections are written on note cards or post-it notes, one per card/post-it note.

The cartoons are a bit like a Rorschach test. People will often look at the same cartoon and see different things in it. So I ask the members of the group to write the number of each cartoon and name the trait or pattern in themselves that they see in it.

As the group takes a break, I do a quick cluster analysis on their selections and develop a Pareto table of traits/patterns. When people come back from break, they get to see the primary disabling behavior patterns that are operating in the group.

The cartoons anchor the conversation, so it is a lighthearted atmosphere, with a lot of laughter. This makes it easier for individuals to begin opening up and owning their own "stuff."

It is important to agree at the beginning that no one uses the cartoons to "diagnose" someone else. It also helps to introduce the concept of polarity in the debrief, so that every trait or behavior pattern that is named--as a group or by individuals--is viewed as a complex mix of enabling and disabling elements.

People tend to leave a session with cartoons with more compassion for themselves and others, greater understanding of their habitual patterns, the payoffs they get from them, and how they might minimize the disabling elements of those patterns without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

A second step is to identify one's Persona ("Who I hope to God I am") and one's No Way ("Who I hope to God I am not"). The process for this is too long to go into here, but essentially, it involves discovering the traits of these two parts of oneself and naming them. Mine, for example, are Queen Elizabeth the First and Edith Bunker, respectively. Then one can look at these two "personalities" as an essential polarity to manage in oneself.

This part of the process is often more challenging for people, more bittersweet, but goes right to the "gut"--and I believe the gut has to churn to generate the power that enables deep personal change.
Ipek Kursat

Although I am not personally aware of actual scientific data that proves that humor supports the learning process, I believe there is evidence that learning is increased when tension and stress is lowered. Therefore, a role appropriate humor can play would be to create a more relaxed, stress-free learning environment which would then cause our mind to be open to new content.

Another role might be in the method of delivery. For example, some people learn best when information is presented in story form with analogies, metaphors, or examples. Jokes often follow this same pattern. Therefore, could we make the leap that new content, woven into a humorous story, might make its way into the brain with less interference?
Steven Johnson

Being able to laugh at yourself is the first step to learning.
FOO Sei Kum

I find that humor can significantly reduce stress levels when people move through change. Context must be set along with the ground rules in order to make it safe. I also use distracters like playdoh, squish balls, and other preschool toys that engage hands in a creative process. The feeling in the room is palpable. Anxiety levels drop, and people are more free to express their feelings within the group. The toys become levelers. The boss or manager is just as much engaged if not more! It creates a level playing field for everyone. <grin>

I help participants come to understand complex systems with things like jointed toys (Zoobs are great), gears, pipe cleaners, Lincoln Logs, straws, paperclips, linking monkeys (Barrel of Monkeys), plastic linking blocks, Lego, etc. Check out the local Toys 'R' Us!
Mary Pat David

To be effective, humor has to be focused on the content or on the process or both. The anxious and nervous laughing at the beginning of events can be used to set the environment as ripe for mutual learning, not one way, thereby allowing trust and inquisitive behavior. Laughing at oneself for being human is very comforting and welcomes "as if" thinking and listening.

Trying on new ideas and perceptions "as if" for a while creates the half a degree of separation necessary to allow us to, as Ken Wilber says "include and transcend."
Rob Curtner

Workplace humor helps to liberate you from the past, and creates space to work on creative responses. There are three typical responses to difficulties: aggression or anger, attachment, and confusion. Responding to a problem with humor about the situation instead of aggression gives a more effective, gentle focus to work with. Often, we get attached to a particular view or method for problem solving. Humor can help us to see that we are working with a particular view that might not be the whole picture.

Similarly when a situation is confusing, humor can help us accept that things really are confusing so that we can realistically problem solve. Humor grants us a special emotional-intellectual freedom to lead.
Eric W. Ederer

Humor in learning processes?
Doing research in the eighties on grassroots education in the trade unions, we used always this criterion: An evening without a laugh is spoilt energy. Learning is laughing.

Now as an educator for management consultants, the same criterion applies. Theory: see Freud, but also the recent book by Berger (of Berger & Luckman) on Humor (De Gruyter). Humor brings mood, but also prepares us for openness and disclosure.
Gerhard Smid

A picture is worth a thousand words, and cartoons are pictures! I can remember lectures for years when salient points are reinforced with an applicable cartoon. Some of my favorite sources are Dilbert and the Far Side.
Jan Katz