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Humor in the Workplace During Change
Humor Being to the Rescue: How Laughter Can Help You Lead and Thrive Through Change (Humor in the Workplace During Change)
By Steve Rizzo, Hall of Fame Keynote Speaker & Author of “Becoming a Humor Being” In this article, we’ll explore the importance of humor in the workplace during change.
Let me ask you something. Have you thought about humor in the workplace during change? When was the last time something at work changed — a reorg, a new boss, a new system, a new strategy — and your first instinct was to laugh?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Most of us, when change hits, go straight to one of a few well-worn responses: anxiety, resistance, frustration, or that blank stare you give your monitor when HR sends an email titled “Exciting Updates to Our Structure.” Humor is probably the last thing on your mind.
But here’s what I’ve learned after decades on stage, on the road, and in front of boardrooms full of brilliant, overworked, and occasionally terrified human beings: humor in the workplace during change isn’t a distraction from the work — it IS the work. It’s one of the most powerful, underutilized tools for managing transition, building resilience, and keeping yourself and your team from completely unraveling.
Stick with me here. I promise this is not a pep talk.
Change Is Not Optional — But Your Response Is
Let me be straight with you: change is not going away. In fact, it’s accelerating. The pace of disruption in business — from AI and automation to workforce shifts, economic pivots, and industry upheaval — means that leaders and teams are perpetually navigating some form of transition. That’s just the reality of the modern workplace.
What IS optional is how you respond to it.
One of the most important things I share with organizations from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses is this: you have more power over your circumstances than you think — and humor is one of the fastest ways to access that power.
When change hits, most people experience what I call “The Emotional Hijack.” Your nervous system goes into threat mode. Cortisol spikes. Creativity shuts down. Communication suffers. Teams fragment. Performance drops. And everyone starts looking sideways at each other, wondering who’s next on the chopping block.
Humor is the circuit breaker.
A genuine laugh — not a forced smile, not hollow positivity, but a real moment of lightness — literally shifts your neurochemistry. It drops cortisol, releases endorphins, and opens the prefrontal cortex back up for higher-level thinking. In short, laughter puts your brain back online when change has knocked it offline.
Humor in the Workplace During Change: What It Means to Be a “Humor Being”
I wrote a book called Becoming a Humor Being: The Power to Choose a Better Way. The title confuses some people at first. A Humor Being? What is that?
A Humor Being is not a class clown. It’s not someone cracking jokes to deflect from real work. It is a person who has made the conscious decision to use the power of humor as a mindset tool — to shift perspective, reduce stress, and choose a better emotional response in the face of adversity.
And here’s the key word: choice.
You cannot always control what changes around you. Mergers happen. Pivots happen. Layoffs happen. The economy does what it does. But you can always choose how you engage with those changes internally. The Humor Being recognizes that perspective is a decision, and that lightness in the face of difficulty is not weakness — it is one of the highest forms of emotional intelligence.
I’m not talking about laughing at people, or making light of genuine hardship. I’m talking about the ability to find the absurdity in a situation, to smile at the chaos, to give your colleagues permission to exhale when everything feels impossibly heavy. That is a skill. A learnable, practicable, essential skill.
One day back in my stand-up comedy days I suddenly became very aware that there were people in the audience that were going through major change and challenging times of some kind. Maybe they were going through a divorce, or having financial problems, or perhaps they or a family member were inflicted with some kind of illness. But for those few hours that I was on stage, their problems or challenges, whatever they were, didn’t own them. Why? Because they simply allowed themselves to take a sacred time out to laugh. “Laughter is the pit-stop in the rat race of life, in that it gives you enough emotional fuel and repairs to get back in the race again. But the initiative and proficiency by which we allow ourselves to laugh, comes from what I call your Humor Being.”
The Science Behind Humor and Resilience at Work
In case you need peer-reviewed backup for your skeptical left brain, let’s talk about the data.
Research from institutions including the University of Oxford and the Mayo Clinic has consistently shown that laughter and humor have measurable physiological and psychological benefits. Humor reduces perceived stress. It lowers blood pressure, strengthens immune function, improves memory and cognitive flexibility — the exact tools you need when navigating a fast-moving change.
From an organizational standpoint, teams that regularly incorporate levity into their culture demonstrate higher levels of psychological safety. And psychological safety, as Google’s landmark “Project Aristotle” research found, is the single most important factor in high-performing teams. Not talent. Not resources. Safety — the feeling that you can speak up, ask questions, make mistakes, and still be okay.
Humor in the workplace during change is a direct investment in psychological safety. When a leader can laugh with their team — not at them — it signals: we are in this together, it’s okay to be human, we are not going to fall apart.
Humor in the Workplace During Change: Practical Ways to Use Humor as a Change Management Strategy
Now let me give you something actionable. Because this isn’t just philosophy — it’s strategy.
1. Name the Elephant, Then Laugh at It One of the best things a leader can do when change is looming is acknowledge it — directly and without spin — and then find the human absurdity in the situation. You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to pretend it’s easy. But if you can say, “Look, I know this is a lot. Honestly, the org chart right now looks like someone knocked over a game of Jenga,” you give your team permission to breathe. Naming the tension and bringing lightness to it is not avoidance — it’s connection.
2. Invest in a Humor Being Habit Start or end team meetings with something light. A funny story. A ridiculous question. A quick team inside joke. This is not wasted time — it is relationship currency. Strong relationships are what hold teams together when the pressure of change is highest. A little humor at the start of a difficult meeting primes the brain for collaboration instead of defensiveness.
More Strategies
3. Be Willing to Laugh at Yourself Leaders who can be self-deprecating — genuinely, not performatively — build extraordinary trust. When you can acknowledge your own stumbles, your own confusion about a new direction, your own imperfect navigation of change, you humanize yourself. And people follow humans. They don’t follow PowerPoint decks.
4. Create Psychological Permission for Levity Some workplace cultures have become so relentlessly serious that people feel guilty for laughing. That is a problem. If your team can’t find a moment of lightness in a 60-minute meeting, something has gone wrong. Model it from the top. Reward it. When someone cracks a well-timed joke that relieves tension, don’t power through — let the moment land. You just watched your team do something healthy.
5. Reframe “I Have to Deal with This Change” as “I Get to Figure This Out” This is a small cognitive shift with enormous impact. Humor helps us step outside our automatic stress responses and see a situation from a new angle. When you activate your Humor Being, you become more flexible — better at finding the upside, the opportunity, the funny version of the story you’ll tell later. That flexibility is the core of resilience.
Humor in the Workplace During Change: Leading Through Change Requires Heart — and a Good Laugh
I want to say something directly to every leader reading this, because I mean it with everything I’ve got:
The world does not need more leaders who perform strength by appearing unmoved by difficulty. It needs leaders who are genuinely, courageously human — who can show their teams that it is possible to navigate hard things without losing your sanity, your sense of humor, or your soul.
I have spoken in front of thousands of business professionals over the years — from sales teams to C-suites, from healthcare organizations to financial institutions — and the rooms that are most in need are almost always the ones where everyone has forgotten how to laugh. Where change has worn them down. Where everything has become so urgent and so serious that the human beings inside the employees have gone missing.
Humor in the workplace during change is the fastest way to bring those people back.
It’s not a distraction, a luxury or what you do after the real work is done. In many cases, it’s the most important thing you can do.
Humor in the Workplace During Change: Get Your SHIFT Together
I close many of my keynotes with this thought: You are going to go through change whether you like it or not. The question is whether you go through it exhausted and bitter, or energized and even, occasionally, laughing.
I know which one produces better results. I know which one leads to longer careers, stronger teams, healthier companies, and — frankly — happier lives.
Choose to be a Humor Being. Not just for yourself, but for every person on your team who is watching to see if it’s safe to breathe.
It is. I promise.
And if you can’t find something to laugh about today — call me. I’ll find something.
Steve Rizzo is a Hall of Fame Change Management Keynote Speaker, former national headline comedian, and author of “Becoming a Humor Being.” He has performed alongside Jerry Seinfeld, Eddie Murphy, and Drew Carey, and has spoken for organizations including Microsoft, Verizon, and Marriott. Learn more at steverizzo.com.
