THE STANDUP JOKE
The one part of the day nobody scripted
It’s my day to run standup. We rotate scrum master on my team, sprint to sprint, engineer to engineer. I get through the updates — what shipped, what’s blocked, who needs a hand — and I’m about to move on when our designer stops me.
“You didn’t tell a joke.”
She’s right. I forgot.
We’ve been doing this since we went remote in the pandemic. Whoever’s running standup that day closes out the meeting with a joke. Nobody voted on it. It just started happening, and it never stopped.
The jokes are bad. Some might say charmingly bad, but more often then not actually bad. Joke that makes my dad jokes sound like a Netflix special. I grab my trustycopy of Laugh Out Loud Jokes for Kids, sitting on my desk stolen from my sons bookshelf for this very purpose.
Q: Who earns a living driving their customers away?
A: Taxi drivers.
Half the room groans. But a split second after I state the punchline our design says the answer out loud. She finally gets the punchline before anyone else, a first for her! Everyone cheers (aka reacting with an emoji!).
Ten seconds, tops. Then we’re back to the stand up.
I keep thinking about why this matters to me as much as it does, because on paper it’s nothing. It’s a bad joke read off a laptop screen at 9am. But standup is one of the most scripted parts of my day — go around the horn, say your three things, sit back down — and for ten seconds, none of that is happening. Nobody’s giving a status update. Nobody’s unblocking anybody. Someone’s just being a person who thought of something dumb and wanted to say it out loud.
That’s the part remote work took first, I think — not the big stuff, the small stuff. The joke someone cracks walking to the coffee machine. The thing you overhear two desks over and laugh at without meaning to. We didn’t decide to build those moments back on purpose. We just noticed they were missing, and eventually somebody filled the gap with a taxi driver joke.
We forget sometimes. Weeks go by. And then someone always calls it out — not because it’s in the sprint retro notes, but because they miss it. That’s usually how I know it’s actually working.
Tomorrow I will be sure to have the joke book right next to me!