Wisdom is shown in serious matters, and is more appreciated than mere wit... A continual jest soon loses all zest. Many get the repute of being witty, but thereby lose the credit of being sensible. Jest has its little hour, seriousness should have all the rest.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The constant joker is compared here to a liar, and the comparison is exact: with both, the audience never knows which sentence to take at face value, so it takes none of them. Humour is a currency, and like all currency it works by scarcity. The person who is funny sometimes owns a tool; the person who is funny always owns a label, and labels do not get invited to serious tables. This is not a case against wit. It is a case for the account behind it: build a record of seriousness first, and your one joke in the tense meeting will do more than a comedian's whole evening.
Practice
- Check your ratio: if people brace for a punchline every time you speak, the label has already been printed.
- Spend humour where it does real work: to lower a room's temperature, never to fill silence.
- After a joke lands, return to substance in the next sentence. The return is what keeps you filed under serious.
Use this when
- Use this if you are the funny one at work; the role is pleasant and it has a ceiling built in.
- Use it in new settings, where the first impression decides which file you go into.
Ignore this when
- Don't swing to humourlessness; a person with no lightness is trusted with feelings by nobody (maxim 79 holds that side).
- Don't stop using wit as a shield for others; the joke that rescues a colleague mid-stumble is wit at its best.
A picture of it
The team's funniest man proposed a genuinely important process change in the monthly meeting. The room smiled, waiting for the punchline, and moved to the next item. Six weeks later a duller colleague proposed the same change with a slide and got it approved. The idea was never the problem. The account it was drawn on had too many jokes in it and not enough seriousness to cover the cheque.
Be witty on Tuesdays. Be serious the rest of the week, and Tuesday's wit will be worth something.