Wit is not only a weapon, but a strategy that takes into account the ridiculousness of working with other people, how extreme they are, how odd when you work with them every day. The first time we ever experience that is in school. There's always a class clown. The moron who likes to throw paper objects at people. The kid who makes funny noises. Those people don't go away. You just put them in suits. I find that if there's no humor, life's just not worth living. Corporate life, executive life, business life isn't worth living without humor. And that's basically the problem with PowerPoint.

But in the context of corporate battles and strategies, telling jokes and trying to be funny can be a bit unreliable, don't you think?
It's very dangerous. But there are ways. It's actually a good column idea. Jokes are kind of the last refuge of people who aren't witty. Ever noticed that? The guy who knows all the jokes is the guy you see and say, "Uh-oh, here he comes." You don't really want a joke a lot of the time; you just want a little bit of the sense that we aren't necessarily playing with nuclear fissionable material all the time. Everybody is so dead serious about the 2006 marketing plan, and the thing is, everybody knows the 2006 marketing plan will be completely out of date by 2005. People like to aggrandize business, and I think it's good to poke fun at things, but you're not going to make fun of everything unless you're really good at it and that's your role in the corporation. But very often in business what's defined as having a good sense of humor is having the good sense to laugh at other people's jokes. If you can do that, then people think you're funny. Which is an odd thing. It's like if you can listen well, people will say you're a good conversationalist. But you have to make sure that the kind of humor you're working with is congenial to the corporate culture. For example, if the chairman likes