Opinion: The Learning Curve of Humour

Sarah Tucker

There are moments when one realises that comedians are doing in public, under lights, what entrepreneurs are doing quietly in meetings, pitch calls, product launches and, on bleak days, while refreshing their bank account and calling it the learning curve.

I had one of those moments recently at the Park Theatre, watching comedians present works in progress ahead of the Edinburgh Festival: brave people discovering, in real time, which parts of their material were alive, which were merely resting, and which needed to be taken outside and humanely dealt with before August.

It was fascinating not only as comedy, but as entrepreneurship, because a work in progress is exactly what any new venture is, however glossy the website, however confident the founder photograph, and however often the word “disruptive” appears in the deck while everyone silently wonders whether the only thing being disrupted is lunch.

The strongest performances were not simply strings of jokes, though the gags came thick and fast; beneath them sat something deeper – grief, shame, family, failure, loneliness, humiliation, the strange business of functioning while privately held together by caffeine, social performance and whatever Boots has near the till. The humour worked because it did not avoid the pain; it moved through it, like someone trying to get past a large emotional sofa in a narrow hallway without admitting the sofa is there.

A joke is not decoration. It is a test of perception. When people laugh, they are often saying: yes, we see that too; yes, that contradiction exists; yes, that absurdity has been sitting in the corner of the office for months, wearing a lanyard and calling itself strategy. Good comedians understand this feedback instantly. A laugh is information. A silence is information. A cough may be information, though in British theatres it is often someone unwrapping a boiled sweet with the moral gravity of a hostage negotiation.

In one or two moments that evening, the material tipped into something so bleak that the room froze, not because the audience was offended, but because the material had stopped offering movement. There was no turn, no release, no change of angle. The thinking had stopped, and when thinking stops in comedy, the laughter goes with it.

That is true in business. Entrepreneurs are often told to be resilient, passionate, visionary and gritty, though grit is more attractive as a metaphor than when it appears in your sandwich, but they are told far less often that they need humour: not office-clownery or banter, which is frequently bullying with poorer tailoring, but the ability to perceive incongruity, release tension and reframe difficulty before it hardens into despair.

Edward de Bono understood this better than most. He wrote 66 books on thinking, creativity, perception and how human beings might escape the prison of their own certainty, and when I was researching his authorised biography, Love Laterally, he told me that his 67th book would have been about humour; not humour as entertainment, charm, or a way of garnering support, but humour as an underused thinking tool, a way of breaking patterns, changing direction, disarming rigidity and allowing the mind to move.

Humour is not the opposite of seriousness. It is often seriousness that has found a better route. Bergson saw comedy in the mechanical imposed upon the living: people behaving as though they have been laminated. Freud understood that jokes smuggle forbidden material past the guards. De Bono understood that lateral thinking depends on escaping the obvious track. The comedian, the lateral thinker and the entrepreneur are all shifting the frame so that something previously fixed becomes movable.

Entrepreneurship is full of situations only bearable if you can see them from more than one angle: the investor who loves the idea but not enough to invest; the customer who adores the product but would prefer not to pay; the mentor who advises you to scale before you have worked out how to survive Thursday. Without humour, these things become demoralising. With humour, they become material.

Politicians have always understood this: Boris Johnson’s gift was making people laugh, which made people more forgiving of disorder and contradiction, while Keir Starmer’s difficulty has often been that seriousness, however necessary, can feel airless when not punctured by wit or lightness. Humour should not replace competence; we have experimented with that nationally, but competence without humour can feel like being locked in a committee room with the blinds down.

For entrepreneurs, the lesson is not to become funny, but to understand what humour reveals: vanity, fear, rigidity and the gap between what people say and what is happening. It is a diagnostic tool, often kinder than confrontation, because a good joke allows people to recognise the truth without immediately defending themselves against it.

That is why sustained humourlessness is so interesting. Sometimes things are not funny because they are tragic, cruel or too raw to touch, but humourlessness in a person, organisation or culture often tells us that people are frightened, authority cannot be questioned, contradictions cannot be named, and the official story has become so fragile it must be protected from a raised eyebrow.

Satire itself has become more difficult. How do you satirise Donald Trump when he appears to arrive pre-satirised, inflated beyond caricature, speaking as though a cartoon has seized control of its own caption? The answer is to reveal the system that rewards the performance. Good humour does not merely point at the clown. It asks why the circus is full.

The same is true of entrepreneurial thinking: the useful joke reveals the hidden structure. Why call this innovation when it is panic with a new font? Why have another meeting about agility when the organisation moves with the lightness of a Victorian wardrobe? Why say we value creativity while rewarding only compliance?

At the Park Theatre, the comedians were testing honestly, asking not for applause but whether the work landed, whether the room breathed, where the pulse was. That is the entrepreneurial learning curve in its most distilled form. Try something. Watch closely. Keep what lives. Cut what does not. Notice the silence. Do not confuse darkness with depth, or solemnity with seriousness, or laughter with triviality. When something is genuinely funny, thought has moved; a pattern has shifted; a fixed idea has cracked. And when nothing is funny for too long, beware. It may mean the subject is sacred, the wound is open, or everyone in the room has stopped thinking and is waiting for permission to laugh.