Office humour

I've been working in the book-mines for three weeks now, and I'm still not sure what the acceptable limit for humour is.

In Regent street, before our visiting students fled back over the ocean, we had a social agreement that the bar was pretty damn low: in the name of jokes, you could get away with saying some truly horrendous things. For some reason, my personal clichés were Baxter Bragg, Ketamine and the Trail of Tears. Not all at once, of course.

The thing is, I don't know how muich will be accepted with levity at my new place. Regent street was largely populated with street-urchins and nihilists, you see. I have tested the limits and proved that in the context of a friday afternoon it is OK to joke about the Bay of Pigs, Collectivisation, and to describe Haiti after a hurricane as "A slip-n-slide with guns". I'm not sure about that last one, but that might just be because I think the slip-n-slide is an American phenomenon.

WJB and TD have, perhaps, pushed the comfort zone with their running joke about

HOLY crap, the laptop started slipping and in the process of catching it I catapulted soggy bran onto the keyboard. Do you see what I go through for this gimmick? Do you See??