paulmck

This is part of the Kernel Recipes 2025 blog series.

Humor is both difficult and dangerous, especially in a large and diverse group such as the audience for Kernel Recipes. My advice is to do many formal presentations before attempting much in the way of humor.

This section will nevertheless talk about use of humor in technical presentations.

One issue is that audience members have a wide range of languages and dialects, and a given joke in (say) American English might not go over well to (say) Welsh English speakers. And it might be completely mangled in translation to another language. For example, during a 1980s visit to China, George Bush Senior is said to have quipped “We are oriented to the Orient.” This translates to something like ”我们面向东方”, which translates back to something like “We face East”, completely destroying Bush’s oriented/Orient pun. So what did the poor translator say? “是笑话,笑吧”, which translates to something like “It is a joke, laugh.”

So if you tell jokes, keep translations to other cultures and languages firmly in mind. (To be fair, this is advice that I could do well to better heed myself!)

In addition, jokes make fun of some person or group or are based on what is considered to be abnormal, excessive, or unacceptable, all of which differ greatly across cultures. Besides which, given a large and diverse audience such as that of Kernel Recipes, there will almost certainly be someone in attendance who identifies with the person or group in question or who has strong feelings about the joke’s implications about abnormality, excessiveness, or unacceptability. That someone just might have a strong negative reaction. And this should be absolutely no surprise, given that humor is used with great effect as a weapon in social conflicts.

In my youth, there were outgroups that were frequently the butt of jokes. These were often groups that were not represented in my small community, but were just as often a single-person outgroup made up of some hapless fellow student. Then as now, the most cruel jokes all too often get the best laughs.

Yet humor can also make a speech much more enjoyable. So what is a speaker to do?

Outgroups are often used, with technical talks making jokes at the expense of managers, salespeople, marketing departments, lawyers, users, and occasionally even an especially incompetent techie. But these jokes always eventually find their way to the outgroup in question, sometimes with devastating consequences to the hapless speaker.

It is better to tell jokes where you yourself are the butt of the joke. This can be difficult at first: Let’s face it, most of us would prefer to be taken seriously. However, becoming comfortable with this is well worth the effort. For one thing, once you have demonstrated a willingness to make a joke at your own expense, the audience will usually be much more willing to accept their own shortcomings and need for improvement. Such an audience will usually also be more willing to learn, and the best technical talks are after all those that audiences learn from.

What jokes should you tell on yourself? I paraphrase advice from the late humorist Patrick McManus: The worst day of your life will make the audience laugh the hardest.

That said, you need to make sure that the audience can relate to the challenges you faced on that day. For example, my interactions with the legal profession would likely seem strange and irrelevant to a general audience. However, almost all members of a Kernel Recipes audience will have chased down a difficult bug, so a story about some idiotic mistake I made while chasing down an RCU bug will likely resonate. And this might be one way of entertaining a general audience while providing needed information to those wanting an RCU deep dive.

Or maybe you can figure out how to work some bathroom humor into your talk. Who is the butt of this joke? You decide! ;–)

Adding humor to your talk often does not come for free. Time spent telling jokes is not available for presenting on technology. This tradeoff can be tricky: Too much humor makes for a lightweight talk, and too little for a dry talk. Especially if you are just starting out, I strongly advise you to err in the direction of dryness. Instead, make your technical content be the source of your audience’s excitement.

Use of humor in technical talks is both difficult and dangerous, but careful use of humor can be a very powerful public-speaking tool.

Perhaps some day I, too, will master the use of humor.