The Joke I Wish I Could Take Back

I made a joke about school shootings once.

I grew up in Texas so I thought it was fair game. It was at the Wild Rover, on Karl Johan's gate in Oslo. Friday night, around seven. Not an open mic. A proper comedy night, paying crowd, lights up.

The bit was about growing up in Texas, learning to shoot before you learn to drive. The punchline was that gun violence in American schools is a problem.

It did not land.

I felt the hair go up on the back of my neck. My teeth clenched. Somewhere in my stomach a small knot formed and stayed there. I kept going. Straight into the next bit, no attempt to save it. You learn that on stage. You do not pour good time into a dead joke.

Here is the part I am less proud of.

In the moment, I told myself it just did not land. Wrong room, maybe. Wrong night. It was only later, watching the recording back, that I saw what actually happened. The joke was not unlucky. It was distasteful. I had reached for the edge and grabbed something I did not mean.

The silence was right. I was wrong.

The stage tells you the truth for free

Comedy is the only room where I have almost no power.

The crowd can heckle me. They can leave. They can sit in total silence and watch me sweat, and there is nothing I can do about it. I do not outrank anyone on a comedy night. I am a guy with a microphone hoping strangers agree the world is absurd in the same way I do.

That powerlessness is a gift.

When a joke dies on stage, you know instantly. The feedback is immediate, honest, and brutal. No one protects your feelings. No one laughs to be polite. The silence is real data, delivered in real time, by people who owe you nothing.

Most leaders never get that.

The classroom does not give you a recording

I teach. I also do the same thing in a lecture hall that I do at a comedy night. I reach for sarcasm.

I have made sarcastic comments about the "lack of poverty" in Norway, the kind of line that only works if everyone hears the irony.

The trouble with sarcasm is that it hides. From the outside, edgy and sincere look identical. A student cannot always tell if I am performing a view or holding one.

And here is the difference that matters.

In that room, I have the grade. I have the mic. I have twenty years of letters after my name. When my joke lands badly in a lecture hall, no one's hair goes up on their neck where I can see it. No one heckles. No one walks out. They file it quietly and they move on.

I get no recording. I get no silence I can read. I get nothing.

The stage taught me to hear a joke die. The classroom is built to make sure I never do.

A joke from the top is never just a joke

Every article on humour at work says the same three things. Use it carefully. Read the room. Avoid sensitive topics. All true. All useless. Because the careful, de-risked, focus-grouped humour they are describing is not humour at all. It is a performance of being approachable with the actual risk surgically removed. Your team can tell. They always can.

Real humour costs something. You offer a piece of how you see the world and you risk it not landing. That risk is the whole point. It is the same risk that builds trust, because the only way to say "I am in this with you, I am not above it" is to be a little exposed when you say it.

That is the version most leaders are too scared to use.

But there is a darker version, and it is the one that should worry us more.

Some leaders use humour perfectly well. But the fatal flaw is they use it to punch down. The joke that makes one person the butt. The "relax, it was just a joke" when someone flinches. That is humour working exactly as intended, for someone who wanted distance and dominance and found a socially acceptable delivery system for both.

A joke from someone who outranks you is never just a joke. It cannot be. The power gap is in the room whether you acknowledge it or not. When I make a wise crack in a lecture hall, the laugh I get might be agreement. It might also be a whole bunch of people who cannot afford to not laugh.

I do not always know which. Neither do you.

What to actually do with this

Stop trusting the laugh.

When you are the most senior person in the room, the laughter you get is the least reliable signal you will ever receive. People laugh up the hierarchy for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you were funny. The silence you should fear is not the awkward one. It is the polite one.

So go looking for the feedback the room is built to hide from you. Ask the person who did not laugh. Ask them later, privately, when the grade and the mic are not in play. Watch the recording, metaphorically, of your own jokes. Notice when you reached for the edge and grabbed something you did not mean.

I made a joke about school shootings to a room that owed me nothing, and they told me the truth for free.

Your team owes you plenty. They will not tell you anything.

P.S. I still do stand-up. Partly because I love it. Partly because it is the only room left where no one knows my credentials, and a roomful of strangers will tell me, instantly and without mercy, when I have got it wrong. Everyone in a position of power should have a room like that. Most of us spend our careers making sure we never do.