See, people, this is how you prove you have a sense of humor when one of your employees goes bonkers on one of your (admittedly deserving) customer/troll hybrids:
Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet. (The reason we’re not commenting is that we respect the privacy of the individual. People can speak on their own behalf; we won’t do it for them.)
That bit about privacy matters to customers and employees.
Ha! You don’t see humor and integrity combined like that very often.
It is a well-crafted comment for several reasons. Not only is it brief, but it conveys a lot of information despite it’s brevity. And it is humorous.
I just read your parallel post over at The Mod Squad. To use humor needs recognition of a single prerequisite, namely that the target audience has a sense of humor, or at the minimum a capacity to accept an attempt to deliver humor. The messenger is not required to intend the topic or statement to be humorous, but they should know their audience.
In other words, humor is a double-edged sword. If it is not received as humorous, it is possible to be offensive or confusing; not all inside jokes are obvious – hence they’re “inside”, and not all self-deprecating comments are humorous if they hit too close to home.