Is it delicious?

On Saturday I returned from a week in my favorite part of Mexico, surfing with my best friend. His mom picked us up at the airport along with his kindergartner son. On the ride home, his son asked what time it was, so I told him. Then he goes, “A kid in my class has a watch. Like, he’s a kid, why does he have a watch?” Did I… just hear his first bit?

Maybe I was just in a comedy state of mind. On the flight home I read a New Yorker piece on comedy, originally published in 2002 and re-printed in last month’s comedy issue.

The author followed a researcher who was on a quest to find the world’s funniest joke via crowdsourcing. (The winner is at the bottom.) He also met with comedy writers and chronicled some comedy theory. Some highlights:

“Incongruity theory,” the most widely accepted humor doctrine today, was born in the seventeenth century, when Blaise Pascal wrote, “Nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which one sees.”

and this

In an e-mail, Mike Myers wrote, “Del Close said that there is very little difference between the realizations ‘a-ha we are going to die,’ and our laughter, which is ‘ha-ha’ — he would say that ‘ha-ha’ and ‘a-ha’ are related industries.”

and this

The book “Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy,” by Greg Dean, asserts, “Hard consonant sounds, especially K sounds, which include hard C, Qu, and, to a lesser extent, T, P, hard G, D and B, tend to make words sound funnier.”

The author tells the story of an aspiring TV writer, Brent Forrester, who essentially did what Gen AI would do today: watch hundreds of episodes of comedy and come up with five humor mechanisms. They are wordplay, comic irony, combining the sacred and profane, reversal of scale, and the unintentional revelation of something negative.

According to Forrester, “A lame joke has one mechanism: you see an old man with a Mohawk haircut. A brilliant joke always combines three mechanisms.”

I thought the end might contain a formula, a pythagorean theorem of humor. Instead, the piece’s punchline wasn’t funny but was freeing in its conclusive lack of direction:

But any analysis of the joke remains unsatisfying. Seeking a thoroughgoing explanation for humor is like seeking the Fountain of Youth, or the Philosopher’s Stone — it is a quest not for a tangible goal but for a beguiling idea. That idea, in this case, is to perfectly understand our illogical selves by understanding the most illogical thing that we do. What sometimes makes us giggle at funerals? Theories and brain maps abound, but no one really understands why we laugh when we do.

When I worked at Condé Nast, I got to sit in on a weekly editorial ideas meeting with the Bon Appetite staff. While searching for more background on where editorial ideas came from, I came across an interview with then-EIC Adam Rapoport, who borrowed his standard for what they should cover from a prior EIC: “Is it delicious?”

Advertisers face a similar challenge: how do we get to ideas big enough to resonate at scale and change the trajectory of our businesses? Like laughing, buying based on brand is illogical, so we have to build brands using illogical means. Choosing to have a brand is making a choice to entertain. Paul Feldwick gives us some guidance on how:

Advertising is a serious business. So the advertisers who invest their money in it should pav attention to the fundamentals of how it works, not to what is fashionable or novel. It is time to rediscover the fact that advertising builds brands best when it is entertaining, popular and memorable, when it is not just a pitch, but a performance.

We have some idea of how to create entertaining and effective advertising — courses like the one I took with the Master of Advertising Effectiveness are tremendously illuminating — but the machine is more Mechanic Turk than die-cast tool.

What’s funny, what’s an idea, what’s an insight, and what’s delicious? At some point you’ll have to trust your gut and just try something that may bomb.

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The world’s funniest joke in 2022:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator, in a calm soothing voice, says, “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, “O.K., now what?”

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben