Paper 1 - Infographic: Humor out work

The text given is an infographic taken from the website of “Humor at Work”, which is an

American company that provides resources on how to achieve success and happiness in the

workspace. Even though the infographic is easy to understand for a wider audience it is targeted

at the working class in America. The author achieves the purpose of informing people about the

uses of humor at work and why it is missed by presenting data through illustrations, icons, and

written language such as labels and snippets.

The infographic has “Why humor at work is missing” as a heading written in relatively larger

fonts and a bright orange color. This gives the audience an idea of what the infographic is about

as well as captures their attention with the large fonts. Next to the heading, there is an illustration

of a milk carton with the label “missing Hugh Moore” on it. This alludes to how missing people

are put on milk cartoons but in this illustration “Hugh Moore” is to be read as “humor”. The use

of this joke relates to the infographic as the author is using humor in his own infographic. This

sets the light-hearted tone for the infographic together with the bright orange used.

“… why do only 33% of workers use it?” is written as a subheading giving statistics as a reason

for why this infographic was made with that heading. Beneath the sub-reading, there’s an

illustration of a person with thought bubbles showing data on why people don’t use humor at

work. The data is presented as a percentage with the color making it easier for the audience to

track the most important information from a quick look at the infographic. These statistics have
snippets explaining what the percentage is about. It represents why workers don’t use humor at

work which informs the audience further about what was stated in the heading. The illustration

makes it more visually appealing and easy to obtain the information.

A banner titled “The people want humor” with fists and text bubbles are illustrated as well.

Framing humor at the workplace as a political campaign, makes it seem more important than

people think it is. It could also be understood as the base of hyperbole to create humor by

comparing it to something as important as a political campaign. The statistics show how many

employees, professionals, and CEOs think that humor in the workplace is important. The use of

different works relates to the title of the banner using people. The statistic again has the same

color as the heading to make it easier to get the important information. The banner is colored

blue which matches the color of the second part of the infographic which shows why humor is

needed at the workplace. This color choice is made because the worker in the banner talks about

the need for humor at work.