Don’t try to be funny at work unless you want to risk your job and any chance of ever getting promoted, management professors say

How can you get ahead in your career and still enjoy the ride?

One solution offered in business books , LinkedIn posts and team-building manuals is to use humor . Sharing jokes, sarcastic quips, ironic memes and witty anecdotes, the advice goes, will make you more likable, ease stress, strengthen teams, spark creativity and even signal leadership potential.

We are professors of marketing and management who study humor and workplace dynamics. Our own research – and a growing body of work by other scholars – shows that it’s harder to be funny than most people think. The downside of cracking a bad joke is often larger than what you might gain by landing a good one.

Fortunately, you don’t have to tell sidesplitting jokes to make humor work for you. You can learn to think like a