Can you use humor in Common App activity descriptions?

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, valued a quality they called texture: the sense that a living, particular person stands behind the paper. Students who learn to put ideas into their activity descriptions sometimes lose it by taking the lesson too far, until every line acquires a quotation and every job a theory.

Read in a row, such a page begins to sound like a student performing seriousness, and readers who have seen thousands of files can hear it. A page that sounds staged makes even its true lines harder to believe, which is a poor return on all that effort. One kind of line restores the person, and where it goes matters as much as what it says.