Police Psychology | Humor and Culture

I was lecturing on police psychology to a conference crowd in Singapore, and I had included a funny metaphor of the development of the Apollo moon vehicle by NASA to show the rigidity in police organizations. The punch line is that NASA, like police organizations, relied on decisions based on the rear ends of horses centuries before. It is a funny and amusing story and gets from a small chuckle to a major minute’s ovation in America when it is finished. In Asia, the audience felt I was insulting the police commissioner who they liked a lot (and I did too). Since it was my opening story, I sort of lost that audience as they would cringe every time I started a new story or joke. I guess you could say it was Zen – “be the horse’s rear end.” I became the rear end of the horse. With over 450 keynote addresses in my life, this was one of two that I hated intensely.

Laughter is the world’s best medicine. Or is it? Unlike vaccines and typical pharmaceutical drugs, humor is not necessarily universal. What we find funny here in the United States may be considered offensive in other countries. Humor can be vastly different from person to person, culture-to-culture, religion-to-religion, and even among sexual orientations. Everyone enjoys some form of humor, however, the humor that is enjoyed and valued may be vastly different depending on the person’s background, exposure and beliefs.

Charles Darwin explored the adaptive ability of humor and concluded that (more…)