There are two kinds of bamboo. Clumping bamboo stays politely where you put it. Running bamboo thinks, Lovely garden you’ve got here. I’ll take all of it.

I think office jokes work the same way. Some are clumping jokes. Someone says something funny in a meeting. Everyone laughs. Perhaps someone snorts. Then we move on with our lives. Contained. Well behaved. No structural damage.

But then there’s running bamboo. The joke gets under the fence. It appears in another meeting. Then in Teams. Then six months later someone says three apparently innocent words and four people collapse laughing while everyone else wonders whether they’ve accidentally joined a cult.

These are the jokes that become part of a team's language. We have one at work. When things become particularly frustrating, and we reach that exquisite point where the available options appear to be cry, resign or overturn a small table, someone will suggest:

Dance party.

The rest of the sentence is never spoken. Throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care. Except, in our version: Because we just don’t care. Dance party. That’s all it takes.

And that’s the interesting thing about running jokes. Somewhere along the way, they stop being only about being funny. They become shorthand for

I know exactly how you feel.
Yes, this is ridiculous.
I remember when that happened.
We’ve been here before and apparently we’re still here.

There’s something wonderfully human about creating this tiny private language together. It doesn’t appear in the culture strategy. Nobody put it in the employee value proposition. No working group was tasked with developing a shared vocabulary of mildly unhinged responses to organisational life. It just grew.

And perhaps that’s why these little bits of humour can matter more than they appear to. Because work isn’t built only from the official things: structures, processes, meetings, strategies, and carefully worded statements about who we are.

It’s also built from the tiny things we accumulate together.

The story everyone remembers.
The phrase that needs no explanation.
The look across the meeting table.
The two words that can turn collective exasperation into laughter.

The joke spreads, but strangely, it makes us clump around a shared experience or a ridiculous moment. It’s a tiny piece of language that belongs to us. So when someone says two words — dance party — an entire group knows exactly what they mean.

Running bamboo. Clumping humans. That’s not just a joke. That’s belonging with a punchline.

Running Bamboo, Clumping Humans