Take humour seriously — your students will thank you

Who knew the secret ingredient in graduate training wasn’t more coffee, but more laughter? “A good laugh, we’ve found, is sometimes as valuable as a good dataset,” says WASP professor Martin Monperrus. 

For nearly twenty years, Benoit Baudry, Université de Montréal, and WASP professor at KTH, Martin Monperrus, have supervised master’s and PhD students, and they have discovered something surprising. 

“Humour is not a distraction from science, it’s one of its best allies,” states Baudry and Monperrus, in a new paper: Humour in graduate training.

Research shows that humour boosts learning, reduces stress, and strengthens collaboration. 

In practice, this can mean anything from easing the pain of “Reviewer 2” with a laugh (the archetypal reviewer who criticises the best and the worst aspects of one’s paper with the same intensity) to writing a LaTeX plugin that politely skips reference number 13 (triskaidekaphobia is real, even in computer science).

“The point isn’t the joke itself, but what it creates: trust, humility, and strong teams. Because science isn’t just about solving hard problems – it’s about solving them together,” says Baudry. 

So here’s some advice to fellow supervisors: take humour seriously. Your students – and your research – will thank you.

Text and image courtesy: KTH.