UNLV case shows how sometimes a joke is no laughing matter

He bought a Subway sandwich shop.

“I don’t want to brag,” he said, grinning. “But I took a $60,000 debt and in six short months I doubled that debt. I turned my Subway shop into a nonprofit organization.”

LaCroix sold the shop at a loss, moved back in with his parents and then tried unsuccessfully to become a stand-up comedian.

But he kept his sense of humor. And that self-deprecating humor helped him become the 2001 World Champion of Public Speaking and the owner of the Humor Institute in Las Vegas.

“It’s a safe humor because you’re pointing the finger at yourself,” said LaCroix, who holds humor “boot camps” to teach people, including corporate executives, how best to use humor professionally.

Unfortunately, LaCroix said, it’s not uncommon for people to get into trouble when trying to use humor. His examples included politicians — attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions is one — as well as UNLV math instructor George Buch, whose Facebook exchange last week with student Javier Aget-Torres still has the campus in an uproar.

In an exchange on Facebook — Aget-Torres later said he and the instructor knew each other outside the classroom — Buch said he’d alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement about students in his class who were there illegally, adding that there would be “no safe spaces in my classes” for such students and that, if need be, he’d turn Aget-Torres in to ICE.

While the exchange went on — a number of people followed it — other students became alarmed, and it wasn’t long before news organizations were calling.

Even before students called on administrators to fire Buch, he apologized to the student newspaper: “I’m extremely sorry for the comments. I know how hurtful they are to many of you. It was intended to be a joke, although clearly a poor one.”

Lending credence to Buch’s claims that what he said was made in jest were smiley-face emoticons with his comments, including one accompanying his threat of turning Aget-Torres in to ICE. A statement made over the weekend by Aget-Torres also seemed supportive of Buch’s jesting being misinterpreted:

“The narrative that was created and put out there was not reflective of the way I was interpreting this experience. … I genuinely thought he was giving me a hard time, and being snarky.”

LaCroix says there’s a simple lesson to learn from the UNLV dust-up if Buch was indeed joking: Remember that humor is in the mind of the beholder.

Which means that if you are having an exchange on Facebook that several people can follow, you’d better know the perspectives of all the people who could be tuning in to what you’re saying.

“If you don’t know what somebody’s perspective is on a subject and they don’t know where your heart is, you have the very real potential of stepping on a land mine,” he said. “They’ll take it out of context.”

Stepping on a humor land mine 30 years ago played a role in Sessions, then a U.S. attorney, being denied appointment to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan.

Now a U.S. senator from Alabama, Sessions has been nominated to become the next U.S. attorney general by President-elect Donald Trump.

In 1986, Sessions, who had investigated the brutal murder and hanging of black men by the Ku Klux Klan, tried to explain to a stunned committee why he had told a number of colleagues this about the investigation:

“I thought those guys (the Klan) were OK until I learned they smoked pot.”

Sessions said he was jokingly trying to express his hatred of the Klan, but one of his colleagues said he was serious.

Why would Sessions joke that way?

Was Buch joking?

Only they really know.

LaCroix’s advice: “Use self-deprecating humor whenever you can, particularly with strangers.”

Paul Harasim’s column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday in the Nevada section and Monday in the Health section. Contact him at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow @paulharasim on Twitter