This is a big part of being liked and respected. It’s easy to like someone with a sense of humour, so getting people to support you is bound to be easier. If you can make someone laugh, you’ve pretty much hooked them.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you should go around the office or wherever asking, ‘Have you heard the one about … ?’ You don’t need to be a joker, or count how many belly laughs you manage to get out of other people each day. I’m not talking about that kind of humour.

And let’s get the other things I’m not talking about out of the way while we’re here. Certain types of humour are off limits to Rules players:

• anything that makes someone else in the group/family/organisation the butt of the joke …
• … which includes any kind of practical jokes that make someone else the butt (which is basically all practical jokes to be honest)
• anything that is offensive to minority social groups – sexism, racism, jokes against disabled people and so on.

Making fun of people who aren’t part of the group is still ultimately not a very kind thing to do, and won’t make you a likeable joker. They’ll make you an unlikeable one. The only exception I can think of to this is satire, which pokes fun at people who have chosen to put themselves in the public eye. So you’re allowed to make (acceptable) jokes about the incumbent Prime Minister or President if you like.

So what does that leave you with? Well, there’s a whole raft of humour along the lines of witticisms, surreal connections, clever puns, irony … This is either your natural style or it isn’t. If it is, that’s great. Go for it. However, if it isn’t, it’s not really a thing you can learn. Humour is extremely personal.

Fortunately, however, there is one branch of humour that we can all master, and it’s the one that will make you more likeable than any other: self-deprecation. We can all make ourselves the butt of the joke, and tell stories that make us look a bit daft, or where we poke fun at ourselves. You don’t have to plan a set number of self-deprecating remarks a day – just do your best to grab the opportunities when they come along. Even if it doesn’t arise that often, people will appreciate your ability to laugh at yourself, and to allow them to laugh along with you.

There’s only one small proviso to this, and that is that you don’t want to undermine your own credibility in the group. In the main this won’t arise, but if you were persistently to come into work and relate how your total lack of forward planning had caused this or that humorous situation at home, eventually people might start to wonder why you’re being employed as project manager.