Volume 19, Issue 2

Drawing on authentic workplace interactions, this paper examines the ways in which effective leaders use humor as a discursive resource to construct particular aspects of leadership style. The conventional wisdom in leadership studies suggests that humor is an important tool for “good” leaders who inspire and challenge their subordinates. The management studies literature suggests a basic distinction between a traditional transactional style, which is rule-driven and task focused, and a more favored transformational style, where leaders encourage creativity and innovation, and are characterized as inspirational. Using data collected in a range of New Zealand organizations, this paper explores and illustrates the wide range of functions served by humor, and the ways in which humor contributes to aspects of the construction of leadership styles. Our analysis supports recent proposals that many effective leaders combine aspects of both transactional and transformational styles of leadership.

We investigated the relation between independently rated joke cruelty and joke appreciation within the thematically homogeneous category of jokes about the disabled. We found a negative linear relation between appreciation and cruelty for females and no relation for males. This remained true even after controlling statistically for four other rated joke properties: surprise, incongruity, difficulty, and resolution. There was no evidence of an inverted-U relation between appreciation and cruelty. We conclude that an optimal cruelty model of joke appreciation is not supported when thematic joke category and other rated predictors are controlled. In contrast, a previous finding that cruelty matters more for females than for males was replicated.

Women characters in the chanson de geste have recently received more attention as part of critical interest in women and their roles throughout history. However, the humor of their roles in these poems and the facets of that humor have not been closely examined. This article looks at women in two different gestes, the William of Orange and royal cycles, and one non-cyclical poem, to determine that women create humor as do men in the same gestes: by humor, repartee and incongruity of clothing, weapons, or action and that this humor is not in isolation but in relation to male protagonists.

The Shyness Scale and Humor Styles Questionnaire were given to 174 subjects (69 male, 105 female). There was a significant negative correlation between shyness and affiliative humor for the total group, which was explained by the inability of shy people to relax enough in social situations to use this kind of humor. There was a significant positive correlation between shyness and self-defeating humor for the total group, a result that was expected due in large part to the low self-esteem of shy people. For the total group correlations between shyness and self-enhancing humor and between shyness and aggressive humor were not significant. Some of the sex differences between shy males versus shy females on aggressive and self-defeating humor were discussed.

Sharif Kanaana and Pierre Heumann: Wo ist der Frieden? Wo ist die Demokratie? Der palästinensische Witz: Kritik, Selbstkritik und Überlebenshilfe [Where is peace? Where is democracy? Palestinian humor as criticism, self-criticism and survival aid]. Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2001. $16.00. (Willibald Ruch)