The department that laughs together survives together. Most chiefs never got a class on that. The ones who figured it out didn't need one.

There is no standard operating guideline for humor. No NFPA standard covers it. Your state fire training bureau doesn't offer a course on it. The curriculum for officer development is full of incident command, personnel management, and budget justification — and exactly zero hours on why your crew is laughing on the way back from a call that would have broken a civilian.

That's not an oversight. For a long time, the instinct in fire service leadership was to treat humor as something to be managed, if not outright suppressed. Professionalism was serious. Serious meant no jokes.

What humor actually is, in the context of a volunteer fire department, is social infrastructure. It is how people who deal with death, property loss, and human suffering on a regular basis keep showing up. It is how trust gets built between the chief who's been in the seat for twenty years and the probie who joined eight months ago and still hasn't figured out how to pack his SCBA right. It is the thing that separates a department that functions as a team from one that functions as a collection of people who happen to park in the same lot.

Chiefs who understand this don't just tolerate the humor. They protect it. Start with the kitchen.

In the hierarchy of the volunteer firehouse, the Kitchen Master occupies no formal position. He is not listed on the organizational chart. There is no line in the bylaws that describes his authority. He does not outrank you. And yet.

The Kitchen Master arrived at his station through one of two paths. Either he was appointed — usually by a well-meaning chief who needed someone to manage the drill night meals and made the catastrophic

mistake of asking the wrong person — or he appointed himself, which is more common and more permanent. Self-appointment in the firehouse kitchen is like adverse possession in property law. Occupy it long enough with sufficient conviction and the territory is yours.

Once established, his jurisdiction is absolute and its borders are expanding. It starts with the stovetop. It grows to encompass the refrigerator labeling system, the approved brand of dish soap, the correct way to store a sheet pan, and eventually a laminated sign above the sink that says something like PLEASE CLEAN WHAT YOU USE — a sign that has been there since 2009 and has never once changed anyone's behavior, but which he will reprint in a larger font if you suggest taking it down.

The cast iron skillet is the clearest expression of his authority. Every Kitchen Master has one. It is seasoned to a specific shade that represents years of disciplined maintenance. It has survived house fires, apparatus bay floods, and multiple changes of departmental leadership. There is an unwritten rule — understood by every member who has been in the station long enough — that the cast iron skillet is not to be cleaned with dish soap under any circumstances. Nobody announced this rule. It was absorbed, the way all true firehouse culture is absorbed: through observation, through a look, and on one occasion through a story that was told twice and never needed to be told again.

What the Kitchen Master is actually doing — underneath the jurisdiction and the laminated signs — is providing something the department needs. In a volunteer organization where most interactions are transactional (training night, the call, the meeting, the fundraiser), the meal is communal. It is the thing that has nothing to do with the job. It is thirty minutes where the chief sits next to the guy who just passed his Firefighter I and they are both just eating. The Kitchen Master engineers that moment, every time, without calling it what it is.

The chiefs who figure this out eventually just leave him alone. Not ignoring him — there is a difference. Leaving him alone means understanding that the kitchen is not yours, that the cast iron skillet has a correct cleaning method that is not up for departmental vote, and that when a meal shows up hot and on time before a long drill, something got done that you never had to ask for.

That is, in its own way, a form of leadership.

He comes in with a good handshake and a real resume. Maybe he moved to the district. Maybe his old company folded. Maybe he just wanted a fresh start. Whatever the reason, he shows up, he joins, and for the first several weeks he is an asset. He knows how to work. He has seen things. He asks good questions.

Then, somewhere around week four, it starts.

"Back in my old department, we ran the attack line off the driver's side."

Fine. Noted. Useful, even. Different departments do things differently; that is how the fire service works. You file it. You move on.

"Back in my old department, we did ladder drills every third Tuesday."

Still fine. Still informational. Still within the range of a new member orienting himself by reference points he already has.

"Back in my old department, the meeting started at 1900 and was done by 2000 because the chief didn't let it run long."

And there it is. That one has an edge on it. Not a sharp edge — he didn't mean to put one there — but it is there. The crew hears it. You hear it. The comparison is no longer informational. It has become evaluative, and the department being evaluated is yours.

The problem is not that his old department did things differently. Every department does things differently. The problem is that he has never stopped being a member of it. He transferred his address. He did not transfer his institutional loyalty. In his internal accounting, his old department remains the baseline — the standard against which everything here is measured and, with few exceptions, found slightly wanting.

He does not know he is doing this. That matters, and it does not matter.

What it does to the culture is subtle and cumulative. The crew starts to brace when he opens his mouth at a drill. There is a half-second pause — not hostile, just tired — before someone responds. The running joke writes itself: before he can say it, somebody else does, in a flat voice, and the room laughs, and he laughs too, because he is a good sport, and nobody says what is actually true, which is that it has stopped being funny and started being load-bearing.

The chief's challenge here is real. This member has experience worth keeping. Somewhere inside the comparison is often a legitimate observation — a better hose load, a smarter pre-plan format, a training rotation worth borrowing. The reflex to dismiss everything because of the framing is almost as costly as leaving the framing unchecked.

The move that works, when chiefs find it, is redirection. Not "stop comparing us to your old department" — that conversation goes nowhere and creates resentment. Instead: "How would you set it up here?" Four words. They force the comparison to become a contribution. They ask him to stop measuring and start building. Some members make that turn. They become genuinely valuable, because they arrived with outside perspective and eventually chose to invest it in this department instead of spending it on the last one.

The ones who never make the turn usually find their way out eventually. The old department, whatever its virtues, is not coming back. At some point, this is the department. The sooner he figures that out, the sooner the crew stops finishing his sentences.

There is a specific kind of humor that only exists inside an emergency response. It is not explained well to outsiders, and the ones who try to explain it usually make it sound worse than it is. It is dark, it is fast, and it is deeply functional.

At 0300 on a Tuesday, your crew is standing in a parking lot next to a dumpster that is, technically, on fire. The homeowner who called it in is watching from the doorway in a bathrobe. The engine that responded has five people on it. Most of whom have been awake for the last 20 hours after working a full day at their paying job and then running calls all over town ever since. Someone says something. The crew laughs. It is not a kind joke. It does not hold up in daylight. In this moment, at this hour, it is exactly right.

What you're watching is a pressure valve doing its job. Stress stacks — shift after shift, call after call, year after year — and it needs somewhere to go. The laugh is where it goes. This is not a firefighter thing specifically. Soldiers figured it out. Surgeons figured it out. Hospice workers figured it out. Anyone who spends enough time at the edge of what people are built to absorb eventually finds the same release.

The difference between fire service humor and the version that corrodes a culture is mostly a matter of direction. Humor that bonds the crew — that references the shared experience, the absurdity of the situation, the private language of the department — pulls the team together. Humor that punches down, that excludes, that surfaces at the wrong moment in front of the wrong audience, does not. The chief's job is to know the difference.

You will not always get it right. Neither will your crew. But a chief who has built enough trust that the team can laugh together is a chief who will also get honest information about what went wrong on a call. Those two things are connected.

It has no official meeting time, though everyone knows when it starts. It has no agenda, though certain topics are guaranteed. It has no membership roster, though walking in late is its own form of attendance — specifically, it is the form that guarantees the next twenty minutes belong to everyone else in the room.

The Coffee Club meets every morning. The coffee is hot, the opinions are hotter, and the sarcasm is always served fresh. Around the table you will find a cross-section of the fire service that no personnel committee could assemble on purpose: seasoned members who have forgotten more about the job than most people ever learn, sitting next to members who are still figuring out which end of the nozzle to hold. Chiefs from three different departments. A guy who retired seven years ago and has been showing up ever since on the apparent assumption that retirement is optional. Somebody's brother-in-law, whose presence has never been explained and at this point never will be.

The conversation moves fast and covers everything. Last night's structure fire two towns over has already been fully reconstructed, critiqued, and filed — the attack line placement, the ventilation timing, the mutual aid response that took eleven minutes longer than it should have. Local politics get the same treatment. The town board meeting from Tuesday. The road project that has been blocking apparatus access to the east side of the district for six weeks. The commissioner who asked at the last budget hearing whether the department really needed two thermal imagers.

From the outside, it sounds hostile. The interruptions are constant. Nobody finishes a sentence without someone finishing it for them, usually incorrectly, always confidently. The table talks over itself. Somebody is always wrong, and everybody knows it, and the person who is wrong knows it too, and this changes nothing about the volume or the certainty with which the wrong opinion is being delivered.

And yet.

Walk in on any given morning and what you are actually watching is twenty, thirty, sometimes forty years of shared history playing out in real time. The ribbing is fluent because it is earned. The story about the time someone backed the engine into the bay door — the door that was only three-quarters open, the door that everybody had been told to watch — has been told at this table more times than anyone can count. It surfaces easily, the way old stories do when the people in the room were all there for the original version. It lands with a laugh every time. Not because it is still funny in the way new things are funny, but because it is funny in the way that belonging is funny — the laugh that says we were all there, we all saw it, and you are still one of us.

The new member who stumbles into the Coffee Club for the first time usually makes one of two mistakes. He either says too little, which reads as standoffish, or too much, which reads as not having paid his dues yet. What he is actually walking into is a room with its own hierarchy — one that has nothing to do with rank and everything to do with tenure and wit. You earn your seat here over time. You earn it by showing up, by taking the shot when it comes your way, and by having the good sense to laugh at yourself before someone does it for you.

The chief who understands the Coffee Club understands something most leadership curricula miss entirely: the informal network is the real network. What gets decided in the bay, at the table, in the parking lot after the meeting is often more consequential than what gets decided in the meeting itself. Culture does not live in the SOGs. It lives in rooms like this one, passed around with the coffee, maintained by people who have earned the right to say the thing that cannot be said anywhere else.

Show up. Take the ribbing. Laugh at the story you have already heard fourteen times.

That is not wasted time. That is the job.

There is one more thing worth saying, and it is the thing most officer development curricula skip entirely.

You are allowed to be funny.

Not at the expense of the job. Not in a way that undermines your authority or your accountability. But the chief who is relentlessly, robotically serious — who never cracks wise at a drill, never plays into the running joke that has been going since 1987 about the department across the county — is not a chief people want to work for.

The best chiefs in the volunteer fire service are not funny despite their authority. They are funny because they are secure enough in their authority not to need the distance that seriousness creates. They can absorb a joke at their own expense. They can be the first one to laugh when something goes sideways in the way that is not dangerous, just absurd.

This is not a soft skill. This is culture management, executed with a punchline.

Your job is to hold the department together. Humor is one of the tools that does that. It always has been.

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Papazoglou, K. (2023). Stress, prevention, and resilience among first responders. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(24), 7174.

IAFC Officer Development Handbook, 3rd ed. (2015). International Association of Fire Chiefs. Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance. Annual Firefighter Suicide Data Reports (2020–2025). ffbha.org National Volunteer Fire Council. (2024). Retention & Recruitment Report: Volunteer Fire and EMS Departments.

Edmondson, A.C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley. Romero, E.J., & Cruthirds, K.W. (2006). The use of humor in the workplace. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(2), 58–69.

THE MARGIN • Command judgment for chief officers.