Nobody has ever left a mandatory compliance meeting saying, “That was thrilling.”
Yes, policy might not be very thrilling, but the learning experience doesn’t have to be dull!
So why use humour in workplace training? Because it captures attention, helps people process information, strengthens memory, eases tension around difficult topics, and makes training relatable. These are the biggest benefits of using humour in training, and each tackles a common problem L&D teams know well.
And no, you don’t have to turn your scheduled Monday training into a Saturday Night Live special. It’s not about the number of jokes you’re able to make within the first two minutes of a presentation. Rather, it’s about doing the unexpected as a way to keep your audience with you.
Humour is a powerful cognitive tool for employee learning. And it deserves a place in every L&D toolkit.
Here are five benefits of using humour in your next workplace training.
1. Attention is the first victory
For workplace learning and development, attention is where learning begins.
Bringing humour into the workplace is one of the easiest ways to earn your team’s attention. If information is never properly noticed, it is never properly stored, which makes it harder to retrieve later.
So what makes humour such an effective attention-grabbing tool?
Well, the brain is a pattern-recognition machine. It learns to predict what usually happens, often subconsciously. When an unexpected image in your presentation, or an absurd remark during your speech, breaks that pattern, the brain stops in its tracks and is forced to figure out what just happened.
Researchers call this moment incongruity, and it is one of the main theories used to explain why we find things funny. Small as it is, incongruity signals to the brain that there is a problem to solve, and a mind that is busy solving a problem is a mind that is paying attention.
Instructional Humour Processing Theory (IHPT) builds on this idea to explain how humour affects learning.
Humour’s novelty and surprise can capture attention, but the theory adds a condition: learners must perceive the incongruity and then resolve it. In other words, your team has to understand the joke. If they can’t, the joke doesn’t land, and everyone is confused instead of amused. And the lesson flies over their heads.
Cue the trainer scrolling frantically to the next slide.
2. Humour helps with processing information
Workplace policies, processes, and compliance rules can be pretty dense content, but your team still needs to understand them.
Humour helps with this process in two ways. First, resolving the incongruity takes a small burst of mental effort, and that effort keeps people engaged, meaning they’re less likely to skim the material. Research testing IHPT found that when an instructor used humour related to the material, it predicted the students’ cognitive learning.
Secondly, humour can turn abstract ideas into concrete ones, and digital training makes that easier than ever. Take our AI coach, which gamifies training with a touch of humour to make it more memorable. Employees learn specific topics through role-play, thinking through their own answers instead of choosing from a set of pre-prepared options. For serious topics like GDPR, the AI coach walks participants through real-life scenarios, so they have to consider every aspect of their response, including intonation, as the scenario unfolds.
Suddenly, employees have a scene to hang the lesson on, making it easier to remember and easier to explain to a colleague. The same applies to a new system rollout, or change to company processes. These transitions can leave people confused and frustrated, and a playful, game-like approach can make a new way of working easier to follow and more likely to stick.
For Learning and Development teams, that means even the driest compliance topics can become training people want to take part in. Enjoyable learning keeps employees engaged with the most serious topics, so they’re more likely to apply what they learn on the job.
3. Laughter makes workplace learning memorable
The funny and the memorable are close companions.
Evidence suggests the brain tends to hold on to things attached to a strong emotional response, and laughter is one of the most visible signs that the brain is highly tickled. Jokes, anecdotes, and visual humour have been linked to better recall of the surrounding content (Qamar, Yasmeen, Sohail, Madsen, Zeeshan & Zahid 2025).
Here’s the interesting part.
Negative experiences are typically remembered more easily than positive ones, which is why a bad meeting can linger for weeks.
Humour appears to be an exception, however. A recent study of word memory found that humorous words were both surprising and more memorable, despite the positive associations. You don’t need to create an uncomfortable environment for your lesson to stick with your team.
But that pull works both ways. Anything funny is easy to remember, which means it can easily become the most memorable part of a training session. If learners walk away quoting the joke but don’t remember the point it was trying to make, the humour has taken something away from the lesson. In workplace training, the laugh is the hook, but the lesson is the catch.
Practical tip: A good test is to ask learners what they remember and see whether the lesson comes up before the joke.
4. Keep it light: Humour reduces tensions around difficult topics
Humour disarms. It lets some air into a tense room and makes it acceptable for light conversation to start again between colleagues.
The workplace atmosphere often carries an air of seriousness and can breed stress and anxiety. This makes difficult conversations feel ten times harder to approach. Giving feedback, admitting you’ve misunderstood a process, or raising a concern- all can feel daunting. It also gets in the way of learning, as stress and anxiety are weak drivers of learning. This is because they compete for the same working memory that new information needs.
Here, humour can be used as a tool to lighten the load. A moment of laughter frees up that mental space, and later, remembering the laugh can bring back the context it was attached to.
In a soft skills workshop on feedback, a deliberately bad example, like a manager who answers every concern with “let’s take that offline,” can get the room laughing, then talking about what they would do differently.
Similarly, acknowledging the absurdity of a situation can take the heat out of a colleague’s mistake without making light of its consequences. A trainer who shares all the ways things went wrong during their first week of onboarding training signals to new employees that it’s fine to ask questions.
Employees who feel calmer are more open and willing to ask questions, as well as admit what they haven’t understood.
In short, many of the skills L&D trains, from feedback to conflict resolution to leadership, involve uncomfortable conversations. A lighter atmosphere makes people more willing to practise them.
5. Why does humour improve learning? It makes it personal.
In psychology, the self-reference effect is the idea that people remember information better when they can relate it to themselves. This is because a personal connection changes how learners process information, making it easier to recall later (Rogers, Kuiper and Kirker 1977). In this 1977 study, the researchers asked participants whether certain adjectives described them. In a surprise quiz later, students were consistently more likely to remember the words they had linked to their own traits.
Although the study used word lists, the principle carries over to workplace learning.
Think about the last training video you sat through. Most of us have seen one in which nobody behaves exactly like a real person. The problems often resolve neatly, which doesn’t reflect real-life complexity and makes the lesson harder to remember.
Humour fixes this by exaggerating what we recognise as familiar, making it relatable.
Imagine training colleagues on a new video call platform with a scenario built around someone speaking for a full minute on mute. The room laughs and nods because everyone has been there. When learners are able to see their own habits reflected back to them, the lesson attaches to their own working lives, and it is more likely to stick. That recognition makes a lesson feel real rather than theoretical.
Get the laugh. Keep the lesson.
Humour in workplace training isn’t so much about being the funniest person in the room.
It’s about breaking the pattern. It earns attention, helps learners process complex information, makes lessons stick, eases the tension around difficult topics and makes workplace scenarios relatable.
The benefits address common problems L&D teams face, like forgotten content, distracted learners, awkward conversations, and training that never reaches the job.
Does humour improve learning? Yes, when it’s done right.
Related humour, tied to the content, has been linked to better cognitive learning, so the key is to use it with purpose. A joke that has nothing to do with the lesson is a distraction, but one attached to an important point can bring the context back when people remember the laugh.
As a rule, use humour to open or close sessions, and use it sparingly around your most critical points.
Used with care and always tied to the content, humour helps learners notice, understand, remember and apply what they’ve learnt.
And if you’re curious about what’s actually happening in the brain when a joke lands in the training room, the Video Arts eBook, The Neuroscience of Humour, goes deeper, from how humour builds motivation to why stress makes a terrible study buddy for workplace training.
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