Leaders who take themselves too seriously are often the least effective. 

It sounds counter-intuitive.

After all, leadership is serious business. It comes with responsibility, consequences.

There’s the unrelenting expectation to perform, every week, every quarter and every year. There's the need to make the right decisions, involve the right people at the right time and hold firm despite the pressure. These are not the conditions normally associated with levity, let alone laughter.

But the absence of humour is often a sign of strain not strength.

Humour, when understood properly, is not distraction. It’s regulation, it’s intelligence and in many ways it’s the opposite of lying.

Lying mustn’t be confused with bull shitting. Someone who’s talking BS, doesn’t care or doesn’t know what the truth is. Someone who is lying knows the truth, they simply chose to ignore it. They lie because their moral development has yet to mature beyond self-interest. They create a story, a lie, usually to increase their power or status.

But humour serves a different purpose. It’s a social tool that serves others more than yourself. It may bring attention, recognition, even fame or fortune. But most of the time it lifts the mood of others, enables them to access a bigger, or at the very least different, perspective and reduces self-absorption.

When a leader can find lightness in the midst of pressure, tension or anxiety they’re demonstrating physiological and emotional control. Their nervous system is not hijacked by the negativity of the moment. Their thinking remains clearer, more expansive. Great comedians and humourists can often hold multiple perspectives at once. This is a sign of a sophisticated mind.

Without perspective, leaders can become narrow, literal, reactive and defensive.

And in that contracted state, humour disappears, because humour requires cognitive nuance and flexibility. It requires the ability to step outside of the immediate frame and see something else.

This is where leadership development can go wrong.

We teach leaders to be more strategic, more decisive, more focused. But we rarely help them develop the wit to bring levity to the moment.

Humour is a very sophisticated communication tool. It builds rapport and creates influence. It’s no coincidence that the most followed person on TikTok, Khaby Lame, is a comedian. The most followed person on Twitch is the comedian Kai Cenat. Mr Bean sits at number 4 on Facebook and four of the top ten people followed on YouTube are comedians.

Overall comedians, have significantly more followers and social reach than most politicians or business leaders.

Leaders who can use humour are more adaptable. They can reframe, recontextualise and reconnect with their audience. Their wit can create space for others to feel safe, to think, to contribute, and even to challenge.

Humour sits at the intersection of several critical lines of development: emotional regulation, cognitive sophistication, and social intelligence.

A well-timed moment of humour can:

• Diffuse tension in a room where pressure is rising
• Reconnect a fragmented team
• Shift a conversation from blame to possibility
• Signal humility without diminishing authority

But poorly used, humour can do the opposite.

Sarcasm can erode trust. Deflection can avoid accountability. Forced humour can feel manipulative. So the question is not whether leaders should use humour. It is whether they are mature enough to use it well.

I’ve worked with leadership teams all over the world, most are operating under intense pressure, financial, regulatory and strategic.

The best leaders can always interject humour at the right moment. And when humour appears it’s often a sign of a healthy team, strong relationships and the ability to see the bigger picture.

Humour isn’t uniquely human. The great apes show signs of humour. Chimps are amusing. Other species like ravens and rats can be playful, believe it or not. But what makes human humour different is its sophistication. Humans can make jokes about jokes. We can create irony, satire, and can even find tragedy funny sometimes. This meta-humour marks us apart from our silicon sibling, AI.

AI can’t ‘read the room’ it has lousy ‘timing’, it’s great at predicting what you want, but it struggles to generate real surprise or originality. No LLM is sitting in the corner giggling to itself.

The cognitive architecture underlying real wit is striking. To be witty you need shared cultural context, linguistic ambiguity, timing, the ability to hold two incompatible views simultaneously; and the precision to create a rapid emotional pivot from tension to relief. That's an extraordinarily complex bundle of capabilities that must evolve together to be funny.

In a world where AI can draft your strategy documents, write your emails and synthesise your data, the ability to make a room genuinely laugh together may become more valuable, not less, because it's one of the remaining signals that something irreducibly human is in the room.

So when the pressure rises in your organisation, does the room become heavier… or lighter?

In that difference lies a profound insight into how your leaders are really functioning and whether they’re equipped for the complexity they face.