Does your office need more fools?

In the history of European monarchy, the most powerful kings and queens knew to keep, separate from the usual obsequious courtiers, a character employed to talk the truth to power.

The problem with many modern offices is that staff are rewarded solely for obedience.

Bosses too often forget that their own interests will be furthered if those below them are encouraged to criticise them constructively. They too easily take comfort from meetings which end with unanimous agreements.

They forget that they have created not the perfect company but an organisation too skilled at censoring itself - and which may hence end up walking off a cliff without anyone complaining.

Bosses should learn a lesson from monarchs and make sure they leave space for jokers who will hint at the real problems, and not just at the Christmas party.

Jokes are a way of anchoring a criticism, another way of complaining; about arrogance or pomposity; about departures from virtue and good sense.

When King James I, who presided over a corrupt clergy, was having trouble fattening up one of his horses, Archibald Armstrong, the court fool, was said to have told him he only had to make the horse into a bishop for the creature to put on a few pounds.

In his Jokes and the Unconscious, Freud remarked that "a joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously".

That said, not every exalted situation is ripe for comedy. We rarely laugh at a doctor performing an important surgical operation.

Yet we may laugh at a doctor who, after an operation, returns home and intimidates his wife and daughter by talking in pompous medical jargon. We laugh at what is excessive and disproportionate.

We laugh at bosses whose self-image has outgrown their worth, whose goodness has not kept up with their power.

In the hands of the best comics, laughter hence acquires a moral purpose, jokes become attempts to cajole others into reforming their characters and habits. There should be a bit more room for them in the boardroom.

Alain de Botton is the author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.