On funny generally and digital funny in particular

Funny thing about funny.

It’s hard.

The old chestnut about “dying is easy, comedy is hard” isn’t just a happy coincidence. Funny that stands up (oops: 86 that pun)—like Chekhov, the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Dorothy Parker and Shakespeare—touches the universal in ways that drama can’t touch.

Think about this: I reckon wit played a huge part in the downfall of Communism. Laughter is about resistance too, a dose of the anarchic in our all-too-conformist lives. Why? Because laughter is about truth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

Bashing Stalin aside, Dilbert and the rise of “cubicle comedy” opened a vast real estate for the workaday wits, who’ve of course reached their apogee in the likes of Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell. (Isn’t a carrel a cubicle? Hmmm.)

Point is, did you catch the clip on the Fresh Baked website with the guy in the Listerine costume? Or Motherload, about the mom who loves snow? Those bits are tantamount to a parable, you ask me. You recognize stuff about human nature.

Here’s the thing. Which would you rather watch: Hard Day's Night or Look Back in Anger? Both set in the UK in the ‘60s, both classic period film pieces…but which gets watched today? Or the original Producers versus All About Eve? (Well, OK, that’s a tossup.) M*A*S*H* or Platoon? Or FAILSAFE or Dr Strangelove? And that first Austin Powers flick really puts paid to an entire industry, doesn’t it?

Me, I’ll take the laughs first any day.

Now around the Fresh Baked oven, there’s often talk about return on investment and monetization and all the marketingspeak created to somehow explain how some branding stories stick and others don’t. (What we in the trade call “brand narrative.”)

Yes, what we do at Fresh Baked can be measured six ways from Sunday online, which is great and helps make the argument that branded entertainment’s The Next Big Thing (TNBT, for short.)

Well, it goes without saying that we think it’s TNBT too.

After a lot of serious and not so serious thought—pints and pints of serious thought—we as marketers (our main gig, really) think that the marriage of branded entertainment and the infinite copying machine that is the internet is indeed TNBT.

So that’s what this blog’s about: weighing the present and the future of the art and science of persuading people via comedy.

But that ain’t all.

We believe—and we’ll put it out there on this blog for everyone to take a pot shot at, so go to—that learning is part and parcel of any marketing message that stands a sliver of a chance of cracking the online clutter.

We poor battered vintage 2009 human beings—especially the talkers and evangelists and change agents every marketing client wants to reach and convert—are suffering from what someone clever called “screen bloom”: we see too much nothingness on the flatscreens increasingly part of every facet of our lives, from the gas pump to the airport lounge to the elevator doorway to (egads!) the public washroom.

Here’s what the research shows, all you marketers out there who think that spraying TV ads hither and thither is really going to amount to much persuasively in this day and age of Facebook and Twitter and TIVO and clickthru remotes.

This is indisputable: any learning expert will echo what you’re going to read next about learning and context.

Ready?

Learning/human performance ace John Wilkinson (most recently trainer-in-chief at Kellogg's and DHL) tells me the professional learning literature suggests retention is multiplied, sometimes by a factor of 10-12 times when the learning experience takes place in an emotional context…like laughter.

Got that? That means that the likelihood of retaining a message or a process is an order of magnitude greater if you’re laughing.

Think about what that means to your messaging strategies and the return on investment of your marketing spend.

Shekels and chuckles, all you ROI-heads out there…shekels and chuckles. Separate, they’re just great…but together: magic.

That’s all for tonight. I have a date with a wonderful novel called Armadillo, by William Boyd. It’s one of the best London novels ever written and not a bad read in these days of financial black holes everywhere. Who knew a tale about insurance could be so fulfilling? And funny?

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/boydw/armadillo.htm

Next up: how laughter is contagious—the clinical case for the power of laughter to persuade virally.

It’s all about contagion. But not the kind you think…

Live and be well/doughhead