Business laugh.

At the place where I work, sometimes members of our board of directors will come in for meetings. That part of this situation I am describing I am cool with. The part that I am not always cool with is the business laughing that usually goes on while these people are visiting. You know how there's business casual? And business class? And business lunch? There is also a business laugh. As far as I can tell, the goal of the business laugh is two-pronged: first, you want your laugh to flatter the person you are having a business interaction with; second, you want your laugh to overpower the person. It might sound like these two purposes are opposites - after all, isn't flattery essentially a form of submission? But flattery and the overpowering of the flattered do not have to be mutually exclusive in the business laugh scenario, and here's how: if you laugh forcefully and loudly enough, the person will feel, based on the volume and voracity of your laugh, that you think that they are absolutely hilarious. That same volume and force will also enable you to control the conversation, providing you can segue quickly from your laugh into a sentence. Also, your flattering laugh will likely have disarmed the person, giving you even more room to control the proceedings.


Unfortunately, there is more than one person who understands how to use a business laugh at our board meetings. So on board meeting days, the entire office is subjected to maniacal, raucous laughter emanating from the conference room. It then travels down the main hallway to the reception area, where it continues for another ten minutes as people stand around trying to out-laugh each other. It sounds like a hilarious situation, presented here, but when you're sitting at your desk trying to work, it can really jar you. But I guess a good business laugh is an important thing to have in your holster, as each one of us will probably be in a situation at some point where we will need it. So everyone practice your business laughs: "HAHAHAHAHAHA-HAHAAA!! AHAHAA-HAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAHA!! So we need to lay off seventy percent of non-essential staff..."


Very good. Now video bonus time: I googled (spell check is telling me I need to capitalize that, but I am using it as a verb, and while Google may prefer that I capitalize it, I prefer that I don't) "business laugh" just to see if my discovery was original or not, and it turns out that there is a yogi ("India's Jeffrey Tambor", I have decided to call him) who got about half as far as I have. That is, he stumbled upon the value of laughter in business scenarios. He doesn't seem to focus on its application in controlling people, but that probably has a lot to do with his world view. Here are two videos of him, and one video of the person he reminds me of: