With humor spreading from boardroom to pulpit to police station, is it any wonder some people are asking: Is this . . . Any Place for a Laugh?

Funerals are, traditionally, a time for seriousness, the one ritual at which belly laughs are notoriously disrespectful. . .unless, say, Berkeley’s Rev. Doug Adams is in the pulpit.

A minister who often tops his somber, black preacher’s robe with a Snoopy stole, Adams is renowned for telling the favorite jokes of the dearly departed--at their own memorial services.

And if the jokes are too blue for church consumption?

That doesn’t stop Adams. He still alludes to the material just to get the congregation laughing, carefully skipping the offensive details.

“A funeral should be a place you laugh, you know. Those who understand the faith know that death is not the end,” says the United Church of Christ preacher, who is also the author of “Humor in the American Pulpit” and a professor of religion at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

“In counseling of the family (after a death), I always ask the family what were the favorite jokes of the person who died . . . When you tell a joke, it doesn’t tell people what to think. It opens up space to think. That is the gift of humor. It honors the audience as people of capacity.”

Audiences at funerals aren’t the only ones subjected to surprise comedy attacks of late. More and more airline travelers are being delighted by (or held hostage by) stand-up flight attendants issuing such directives as, “Well, folks, it’s time to sit up, drink up and buckle up. Federal aviation regulations require that we pick up all cups, glasses and 18-karat gold jewelry.”

Errant motorists have learned that the most painless way to keep traffic tickets off their records may be to enroll in a comedy traffic school. In Southern California alone, about 20% of the approximately 200 traffic schools are now comedy-oriented, estimates G. Vernon Hensel, president of the Traffic School Assn. of California.

It seems no place is safe from yuksters these days. Perhaps in response to the grim pressures of late ‘80s life--gang warfare, economic and ecological calamities--silliness has struck even more unlikely targets.

For instance:

The Los Angeles Police Department recently invited a humor therapist to address the 250 officers who serve in its peer counseling program. Laguna Beach-based Lola Gillebaard worked the group much like a stand-up comic, but police Chief Daryl Gates scored the heartiest response of the day when he was introduced by Sgt. Dick Clark.

“He’s been around a long time--about the same length of time Moses was lost in the desert: 40 years,” said Clark, to much laughter, after which Gates deadpanned, “I didn’t think the thing about Moses was funny at all . . . correct (but) not funny.”

Humor abounds in the AIDS community, especially at Louise Hay’s Hayrides, the weekly and often wacky West Hollywood gatherings for people with AIDS. The meetings, which draw in excess of 400 participants every Wednesday night, emphasize living with joy as best one can despite circumstances. Thus Hay, a best-selling author and metaphysician, routinely exchanges wisecracks with her audience. And five minutes of each Hayride is devoted to audience joke telling.

According to Alan Peterson, a Hayride regular who’s creating a stage musical based on the meetings, joke tellers can be as raunchy as they want as long as the material doesn’t put down anyone. About 50% of the jokes are about homosexuals or homosexual practices, he estimates. Although there have been no AIDS jokes yet, there has been an occasional joke about gay men being tested for disease.

A Midwestern insurance firm that thought its agents were too dull decided to remedy the problem this fall by enrolling them in improvisation workshops at Chicago’s famed Second City. To loosen up business students, the University of Chicago’s graduate school of business has created a joint program with Second City, which allows first-year grad students to take improv workshops for credit.

According to Second City administrator Cheryl Sloan, the workshop is also popular with non-students. For instance, new hires in the creative department at Chicago’s Leo Burnett advertising agency automatically take a Second City workshop as part of their employee orientations.

In the view of Flinn D. Allis, Burnett’s manager for creative recruitment and development, the workshop provides young people in the firm’s training program “a good forum for getting to know each other, for creating partnerships, and it certainly enhances their presentation skills and elevates their sense of confidence.”

At Skunk Camp, the intensive, $1,000-dollar-a-day business training put on by best-selling author Tom Peters, campers typically parade about in obnoxiously loud skunk caps, complete with skunk heads and skunk tails. At the four-day training, held in beachside condos on Monterey Bay, 50 CEOs or other top executives from major corporations soak up such Peters’ teachings as, “The No. 1 premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re wasting your life.”

At the camp’s final dinner, Peters, the author of “In Search of Excellence” and “Thriving on Chaos,” traditionally climbs into a full-size skunk costume and hands out Skunk Camp diplomas--along with potshots sprayed at the graduates.

“Executive leadership is theater,” explains Jim Kouzes, president of the Tom Peters Group Learning Systems and author of “The Leadership Challenge.” “Theater is about emotion, about being inspiring and uplifting, getting people to laugh and to cry.”

Clowns have long made appearances in children’s hospitals, usually on an occasional, volunteer basis. But eight hospitals in New York City now pay the salaries of professional clowns who visit their pediatric facilities for eight hours a day, twice a week, says Michael Christenson, founder/director of the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit.

The clowns are psychologically trained, says Christenson, but they don’t consider themselves therapists. “We’re living balloons. We don’t go in with a religious line . . . We go in with the pure stuff. Hospitals are great straight environments for the clown.”

The Fellowship of Merry Christians, a joy-promoting organization based in Kalamazoo, Mich., is less than 4 years old but has more than 12,000 dues-paying members nationwide, says founder Cal Samra, author of “The Joyful Christ, the Healing Power of Humor.” The Fellowship publishes its monthly “Joyful Noiseletter,” which features jokes for pastors to use in their sermons and cartoons to be reprinted in church newsletters.

The Fellowship sponsors Easter Monday “retreat-playshops” annually throughout the country to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. The timing of the playshops is based on Samra’s philosophy that “the Resurrection is a great cosmic joke, God’s last laugh on Satan.” For those who can’t attend, there’s always the Rev. Tal D. Bonham’s “A Treasury of Clean Church Jokes,” one of the fastest-moving items in the Fellowship’s extensive catalogue of books and audio cassettes on the subject of spiritual humor.

State and national morticians’ conventions have repeatedly hired stand-up comics and humor therapists to entertain at their meetings, says Ron Hast, publisher of Mortuary Management magazine and a funeral director with Abbott & Hast Mortuary in Los Angeles. “Funeral directors’ conventions are known by the hotel circuit to be some of the liveliest and most creative groups in terms of humor,” he says.

Hast suspects this may be because many funeral directors feel pressured by their communities to always present a dignified demeanor. Thus, “when they depart and gather together, some of their party interests seem to be worked to their fullest measure.”

As more stand-up comics have emerged to perform on the ever-booming comedy club circuit, increasing numbers have decided to entertain truly captive audiences: prisoners. Some--such as ex-nightclub comic Burt Rosenberg of Arlington, Va.--even specialize in performing for inmates. Rosenberg has taken his “Big Fun in the Spirit” ministry to prisons in 10 states. The audiences are tougher than drunks in clubs, he says, but “the real miracle is to be an instrument of laughter in a dungeon. Bringing light to a dungeon is right up there with parting the Red Sea, in my book.”

Films of recent vintage have found ever-darker humor in once-taboo subjects: “A Fish Called Wanda” (animal cruelty, stuttering), “Heathers” (teen suicide), “Drugstore Cowboy” (corpse disposal) and the upcoming “Roger and Me” (closure of the General Motors plants in Flint, Mich., described by filmmaker Michael Moore as “the unemployment capital of America”).

Why has all this humor--sick and otherwise--been cropping up where it’s least expected?

Chicago-based business consultant Gail Wilson, who employs comedy extensively in workshops for such Fortune 500 firms as Honeywell and Square D, suggests that humor speaks directly to the bottom line.

In the workplace, she says, it helps people be more flexible--a much-desired quality in today’s fast-changing business world.

“Humor tends to open people up to new perspectives, it helps puncture the images of ourselves that we hold up to the world,” says Wilson. “I think because things are changing so rapidly . . . we understand we have to somehow cope and increase our flexibility.

“We know, intuitively, that humor is an avenue to do that. When we can laugh at ourselves with kindness and tolerance, the end product is that we’re able to dare and try new things.”

Wilson, who presides at seminars with such unfunny titles as “Communication for Visionary Leadership,” also points out that humor inadvertently creates bonding and team building.

“When I’m in your presence and you and I laugh together, it’s nearly as ancient a tradition as if we had sat down and feasted together,” she says. “In my seminars, team-building happens even though the seminar may not be about team-building. One might think humor would create a split, but instead, it creates a bond.”

Although the therapeutic value of humor is hotly debated in medical and psychological journals, many comedy vendors believe the ability to laugh at one’s problems is helpful in alleviating them.

“I think you can work through your problems with humor,” says stand-up comic Judy Carter, a well-known club performer who has opened for Prince and Kenny Loggins. She is the author of “Stand-Up Comedy, the Book” and regularly offers humor workshops in the Los Angeles area.

“I think most people find their lives totally unmanageable,” Carter says. “In my comedy workshops, I get people who don’t necessarily want to become stand-up comics, they want to lighten up. People don’t have the job security they used to have. There are earthquakes. What can you do but laugh about it?”

Comedy not only enables people to defuse fear, it helps them win friends and influence people, in the view of Berkeley’s Adams.

“In the face of the clown, you and I feel intelligent, insightful, powerful,” he says, adding that many Biblical characters were fools for that very purpose. “In contrast, a magician does things that make us feel like we’re dumb, that we have no power. If a bowler hits a perfect 300, a perfect game, you and I really don’t want to be around that person. Charlie Brown gets about 100. He always loses. He never wins. That’s very approachable.”

Therefore, to lessen the unapproachable aura of his black preacher’s robes, Adams likes to add a stole featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Mickey Mouse or clowns. He’s convinced thousands of other priests, ministers and rabbis to wear the stoles as well. They’re made by his wife and have been purchased by about 2,000 clergy and given as gifts to approximately 2,000 graduates of the Pacific School of Religion.

With or without the stole, however, Adams loves to preach about those Biblical stumblebums. Take David, for instance: “David does many things that are very good, but he also takes another man’s wife. I think the problem is that often in church sermons and synagogue sermons, we try to clean the stories up and (we) forget people can’t relate to them.”

So to get his listeners more involved, Adams doesn’t hesitate to hold up cue cards, signaling the audience to boo or cheer or laugh at the appropriate places in the story. In many of the tales, the characters are redeemed, and the preacher implies that those who learn from their teachings can find salvation, too.

Or maybe not. As he likes to say, “If out of the worst of people can come the best of people, there’s hope for our children.”