SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CAREERS / THE PATCHWORK OFFICE : Hear the One About the Office? There Was This Co-Worker, See, and . . .

As the just-hired director of nursing stormed out of her first budget meeting, livid that she would not have the funds for her patient care programs, she caught sight of the hospital’s top administrator. Not yet ready to confront him, the head nurse avoided him by ducking into the nearest available room.

Minutes later, she emerged from a musty broom closet to find her new boss grinning by the door.

“Don’t you dare tell anyone about this!” she said, grabbing him by the collar.

They both started laughing, and at that moment cemented a bond that helped them weather many hospital storms.

In the current economic climate, in which downsizing and budget cutbacks are increasingly routine and workplace tensions can be pronounced, humor is needed more than ever, industrial psychologists say. With its universal, humanizing quality, humor can defuse tensions among diverse groups of co-workers.

Laughter also helps foster creativity and improve morale during uncertainty and change.

“People are burned out, stressed out and have to do more with less,” said Terry Paulson, who conducts seminars to help companies cope with change. “At the same time, businesses today are so frightened about what they say, that they are in danger of creating the very distance that will prevent natural banter and camaraderie.”

Whether the style of humor leans toward pranks and practical jokes, sarcasm or self-mockery, employees can be professional and funny at the same time, said Santa Ana career consultant Kathryn Leyes Fischer.

But it is best to confine cultural humor--whether religious or ethnic--to a group to which we ourselves belong, said Fischer, who recently gave a keynote speech on workplace humor at a Santa Monica College staff development day. It is also important to be sensitive to the person, time and place.

“We may not want to tell our bawdiest sexual joke to our grandmother,” Fischer said, “unless of course she likes that kind of thing.”

Last month, about 50 U.S. Postal Service employees participated in a management seminar in which they blew bubbles to Lawrence Welk music, juggled scarves and read silly bumper stickers.

While it may sound like fun and games, it’s serious business to Chuck Durham, the play shop leader, who believes that humor will help these postal managers improve morale and create a greater sense of cohesion. Durham and his wife, Mary, run the CHUCKLE Institute in Long Beach, a group dedicated to promoting the benefits and creative uses of humor. (“It started as the Creative Humor Uses of the Clinical Knowledge of Laughter Expression, but that didn’t fit on the letterhead,” said Durham, who earned his doctorate on the use of humor in psychotherapy.)

Playfulness at work is increasingly seen by researchers as more than mere diversion. In a soon-to-be-published survey of 1,500 people from a variety of industries, psychologist David Abramis found that employees associate fun at work with job creativity. Those who are stuck in humorless work environments are apt to call in sick or consider quitting.

“Even in fun-resistant jobs, in which people work alone on repetitive tasks, and in high-pressure, competitive situations, it’s possible to have fun,” said Abramis, a member of the faculty of the School of Business Administration at Cal State Long Beach.

But what is a fun-loving person to do when a supervisor frowns on basketball hoops, funny cartoons and water pistols in the office?

“You may have to have fun surreptitiously,” Fischer said. “You may just have to wait until no one is looking and then use the wastebasket to shoot hoops.”

A number of firms have made fun part of their corporate culture. Ben & Jerry’s, the Waterbury, Vt., ice cream company, is well known for office antics such as Tacky Dress-Up Day. Southwest Airlines flight attendants, taking their cue from CEO Herb Kelleher, dress up as elves and serenade holiday travelers.

And to celebrate the Los Angeles Kings’ participation in the 1993 Stanley Cup finals, the chairman of Anaheim-based Odetics wore hockey gear to work and challenged employees to get the puck past him. “We believe that humor instills a sense of creativity and innovation,” explained Holly Barnett, public relations manager for the information management systems company.

Many executives think that laughter among employees represents loss of managerial control. But Laguna Beach humor therapist Lola Gillebaard, whose clients include retailers, utilities, hospitals and associations, finds that just the opposite is true.

“You actually have more control, because when people are relaxed they pay attention and are open to new ideas,” she said.

Humor is also effective when it comes to obnoxious co-workers--those people “created to irritate the rest of us,” as Gillebaard says.

“Difficult people don’t usually receive compliments. So by saying something like ‘I love the way your shoes match’ or ‘You have fantastic elbows,’ you can catch them by surprise and have the last word.”

Still, getting corporate America to lighten up is no laughing matter. While researchers have found that children laugh up to 400 times a day, adult per diem guffaws average only about 15, Durham says.

“In the transition from childhood to adulthood, if we lose 385 laughs per day, what else might we be losing?” he asked. “Perhaps some of our spontaneity, creativity, flexibility and comfort in relationships with others. Like Oscar Wilde said, ‘Life is far too important to take seriously.’ ”

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POINTERS Making Work a Laughing Matter

Some humor etiquette from Terry Paulson, psychologist and author of “Making Humor Work”:

Do:

* Laugh in the hallways.

* Take your job seriously and yourself lightly.

* Hire laughers.

* Become the brunt of your own jokes.

* Tell one joke or story a week to every person you have time to talk to.

* Keep your humor brief and fast-paced.

Don’t:

* Make fun of any group to which you don’t belong.

* Take yourself too seriously.

* Associate your product or service with negative humor.

* Hide in humor. Instead, use it to promote problem solving.

* Worry about humor that “bombs.”