At my seminars, I give a mini-lecture on humor. I explain that the modern world is in the process of outlawing humor, and we don't even realize it because our experts in human behavior never learned the first thing about it (humor). They don't realize that humor involves putting people (oneself or others) down. Compliments are not funny; insults are funny. Humor by nature is not politically correct. Political correctness forbids anyone from saying anything that can hurt someone else's feelings. Humor, by nature, has the potential of offending people.

An article in the Sunday New York Times (10.17.04) proves my point. Humor is now on trial in the California State Supreme Court thanks to "hostile environment" laws, which hold employers responsible for anything in the workplace that has the potential of hurting anyone's feelings.

Amaani Lyle, a former writer's assistant for "Friends," is suing NBC and a staff of comedy writers. The Times article explains how sitcoms are written. Teams of writers spend hours thinking up jokes and free-associating among each other in the hope of finding usable material. As those of you who have attended my seminars are aware, humor is nasty, and the nastier it is, the funnier it is. Ms. Lyle could not tolerate the jokes the writers were bouncing around. Though she was never the target of these jokes, she found them offensive. She was fired in 1999 for reasons not specified in the Times article, but it is obvious that she did not enjoy her job, was not emotionally suited for it, and probably was making the work environment intolerable for the writers she was being paid to assist.

After being fired, Ms. Lyle filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against NBC and lost. Now she is suing based on "hostile environment" laws. Let's hope she loses this lawsuit, too, or we will soon find ourselves living in a national monastery. I have nothing against monasteries. But when we live in them by force rather than choice, they are more accurately called "jails."