Humorbragging

(Illustration by Verplancke/WSJ)

Humblebragging (“I hate that I look so young; even a 19-year-old hit on me!”) has been around for years. Now there's humorbragging.

A team of researchers have found that “humorbragging”—referring to your accomplishments through a veil of humor—allows people to play up their skills without coming across as smug or conceited. And that makes them more likely to get hired or get their pitch accepted...

The researchers used a series of studies to test the impact of what they called humorbragging. In one instance, they sent out two résumés to 345 companies—but one version of the résumé added a dash of self-promotional humor instead of being purely serious: “The more coffee you can provide, the more output I will produce.” The résumés with the joke got an email or a callback by 156 companies, versus 125 for the others.

Another study got similar results when looking at humorous bragging on the first four seasons of “Shark Tank”—people who used humor to highlight their accomplishments were more likely to get funding than others.

Speaking from personal experience (okay, missteps) it's really tough to be funny, especially in a business setting.

Many subjects should not even be broached, or should be mentioned only within narrow constraints. It's advisable to test-run your humorbrag before a trusted confidant. Because of the consequences of a poor reaction to your humorbrag, follow the advice of grammar teachers regarding commas: when in doubt leave it out.