A decade ago I was young, babyish even by youthful standards, and working on a very serious financial newspaper, a state of affairs I handled by regularly sending spoof electronic messages from colleagues' computers.

The standard prank involved going up to the terminal of an editor and sending someone a “witty” note along the lines of: “you're fired”. Another common “joke” involved sending messages to the news desk, volunteering to write absurd stories, or posing silly questions like: “Can someone help translate a document into Asian?”

But the message I recall most vividly and always with a shiver, was one I sent from the unattended computer of an intern working in the Washington DC bureau. Someone had just, I think, sent a serious query to the whole company about the timing of some economics and I followed it up with: “Can anyone tell me who Alan Greenspan is?”

Like all my own jokes at that time, I found it hilarious: Greenspan was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and querying his identity on a financial paper was the equivalent of asking the Daily Sport news room if they knew who Jordan was. But nobody else found it funny, not least the poor intern who was flooded with messages from various economics commentators, inquiring how someone so ignorant had managed to gain employment on such a prestigious organ.

I recount the story because the intern in question, Aravind Adiga, has just had his first novel published. It is called White Tiger, it is a masterpiece and I want to take the credit: if I hadn't scuppered his chances as a financial journalist he may not have blossomed into such a promising writer. Also, the story illustrates some key points about humour at work.

I've been dwelling on the subject after a reader wrote in to say he'd been sent by his employer on a training course in comedy. This didn't, in itself, come as a surprise. I recently revealed how you can now go on training courses in everything from How to Pick Things Up to How to Breathe. Also, I'm aware there have been conferences on the subject (one recently ran under the title: “Laughing at work - it's serious”), that some companies have employed humour consultants (one calls himself a “joyologist”) and that British Airways once appointed an official jester (some would say he is now in charge).

I can also with effort understand the reasoning of this reader's manager. Research has shown that laughter makes you slimmer and fitter, and encourages the release of endorphins, which balance the adrenalin brought on by stress.

But the problem with enforced business jocularity is that corporate culture and comedy are fundamentally opposed. While the former aims to bring disparate people together with a common purpose, comedy divides. And this divisiveness is manifested in various forms, one of which is the simple subjectivity of it all.

Geoffrey from Sales may consider it funny to feign a maniacal fear of the water cooler but it doesn't mean that Emma in HR will be amused. Similarly, I should have understood that many of my colleagues would have found the Greenspan gag as amusing as a motorway pile-up.

Comedy is also divisive in that most jokes have a victim. In the case of the above it was Aravind but you only need to look at the furore caused by Russell Brand this week, after he phoned the police with false information about a sex attacker during a stand-up show, to realise comedy can easily veer into cruelty.

Of course, bland humour is possible and companies often go for it, in the form of daft workplace anthems, talent contests and so on. But the problem with such corporate jocularity - at Microsoft, workers have been known to fill colleagues' offices with popcorn - is that it is never amusing.

I guess the gist of what I'm saying is that mixing work and laughter is fraught with difficulty. And the extent of this difficulty is perhaps best illustrated by the number of “jokes” cited in industrial tribunals. Here's a manager who “joked” about giving a pregnant employee a book entitled 101 Things To Do With a Dead Baby. Here's a promising engineer who lost his job by forwarding a risqué e-mail ...

In the light of this you'd be forgiven for thinking that Ford had the right idea when, in the 1930s and 1940s, they made laughing at work a disciplinary offence at its River Rouge Plant. But there's no need for such extreme measures. If I've learnt anything from being unfunny for so long, it is that exhibiting a GSOH or BSOH at work is fine, as long as you remember one rule: never try to amuse people outside your payband.

This is sensible not only because (a) making jokes to an entire company is always going to backfire (you cannot expect so many people to share your humour), but also because (b) joking downwards can very easily veer into bullying or, even worse, nervous laughter (the worst sound in the world is a bunch of people sniggering at their boss's lame gags), because (c) joking upwards runs the risk of threatening a boss's authority or, even worse, making them realise that people are only laughing at their jokes out of nerves, and because (d) one day you'll grow up, realise you're not as funny as you think you are and be grateful that you didn't inflict your childishness on so many.

Conversely, managers should give up trying to encourage humour in their underlings, not least because laughter, like breathing, occurs naturally everywhere anyway. If even Hitler could manage a few gags in the last days of the Third Reich, which, according to a recent book by the last surviving member of his personal staff, he did, then laughter can thrive anywhere, possibly even in human resources departments.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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