The Laughing Gnome

Go for a job interview and you will be asked a load of questions designed to find out about your personality and whether you will fit in to the company culture. One London Bank for instance asks candidates to imagine they are a small pencil inside a stoppered bottle and then asks them to describe how they would escape.

Other commonly used questions, and I am not making this up, are “What colour car do you drive”, “What day of the week would you like to be”, “Why do bananas not have legs” and “How do you get along with your mum”.

The silly thing about all this is that once you know the whole canon of really stupid questions that lazy HR people fall back on, you can manipulate them. For instance a pal of mine was prepared for being asked, “What would you do if we don’t give you the position”. His reply was, “What would you do if I turned down the position?” He not only got the job but was instrumental in getting these so called psychometric tests banned years later from his company. Another pal was asked, “Can you cope with change” to which he replied “Of course, I used to be a woman.” Did he get the job? You bet.

As someone who works for himself I have never had to face these stupid questions, and I sympathise if you have, but I would like to suggest, from my position of ignorance, that they should be replaced by just one question. “Do you have a sense of humour?”

As far as I can see your sense of humour tells everyone a lot about you, and I couldn’t bear to have a friend who took themselves too seriously. Whenever I’ve worked alongside a colleague who cannot take a bit of a ribbing I have distanced myself instantly and have never subsequently warmed to them.

But having a sense of humour isn’t quite the whole story is it? It’s the type of humour that says so much about you. Do you like gentle jokes or sarcastic put downs? For instance which of these appeals to you more?
a) I made a chicken salad yesterday. You know what? He didn’t even thank me.
b) American football players protect themselves with a cheap piece of plastic in their shorts. They call it a sports guard. Here, British football players also place their privates in cheap plastic. They call it Katie Price.

Joke A is in the style of the more gentle, Tim Vine, approach to humour while B comes from the Frankie Boyle “no hold barred” type. If you prefer the former then my guess is you’re a nice person who gets along with people, while if the latter is more your thing then I think you’re probably edgier and definitely able to give as good as you get. But whichever appeals, at least you can get along with folk.

The reason I am thinking about this whole humour thing is the Ricky Gervais “disaster” at the Golden Globes. He compered the event and upset people by slating or “roasting” celebrity guests, mentioning their drinking habits, bad movies or weird cults. Americans hated his sarcasm and thought he went too far while Brits hated his smugness and the fact that he just wasn’t very funny. Frankie Boyle is also suffering this backlash with his TV show being dropped because we can forgive bad taste but cannot forgive someone just not being funny.

What really, really annoyed middle America however was Ricky Gervais’ last line when he thanked all the organisers and “God for making me an atheist”. Now that’s a very old, old joke. The original, which was around when Noah first skipped wood work class at school, has even been available as a T shirt slogan for many years (check out http://www.lushtshirts.co.uk/thank-god-im-an-atheist-p-413.html). So why the fuss?

Probably because Americans just don’t do jokes about God, and also because it’s a tired old gag, a sign to some of a man losing his powers or just being lazy in his preparation.

But who would you rather work for? Someone who is unwilling to make a gag for fear of upsetting people or someone who makes folk laugh but occasionally gets it badly wrong?

I know who I’d rather be with, and I bet Ricky Gervais has never had a psychometric test in his life.