“You Gotta Be Kidding Me” by Siddhartha Khosla – The Yodelcore version of the “Only Murders in the Building” theme song 🎵
When was the last time you laughed really hard – at home? At work?
What made it successful? Surprise? Context? Timing? Delivery? Execution? Polish? Unpolish? Was it your joke? Someone else’s?
Great jokes take cultivation. Consistency.
Diplomacy. Asking for help.
The best ones involve having trust. safety. certainty.
Currency of a different kind.
It’s easy to lose focus on still executing that one joke even if you are bombarded with so much other … stuff.
Simon, an amazing producer I work with, never misses an opportunity to tell a good joke. Every moment is a chance to tell a good story, be kind, make people laugh. It helps to already have a framework – corporate tools, people networks, mailing lists, presentations, forums, social media. Oh how much more interesting meetings would be if we treated them more like a dinner table where we were genuinely interested in what the person across us had to say because we were just excited they were there and had made the time.
Regardless, when a context is delivered consistently, with a pattern, that is a framework for setting up a really great joke. I spend time getting to know these contexts – who owns them, who they’ve delegated pieces to, how they work, all the people involved.
Together we can bring a smile to someone’s day. Hopefully everyone’s.
10 Tips to Engineer a Really Good Joke with All Your Friends
- Subvert expectations: Once you know the system you want to use, you use the pattern in the system to subvert expectations.
- Make sure the timing is right: It sucks to execute a joke when you don’t know if everyone is going to be there – or worse, misaligned with world news.
- Be extreme: It’s not funny if you don’t go the whole way.
- Build on an old joke (or two): Practice makes perfect.
- Get partners: If you have to go bigger, you need partners.
- Go slow: As for help incrementally.
- Go cross-genre: Pick a topic that has already transcended genres.
- Roast the situation: In the cascade of jokes happening, break the 4th wall and joke about the joke in a blog before it happens.
- Pick something that isn’t niche: Jokes fail when they are not culturally relevant or the subject matter isn’t well known.
- Make sure it’s worth it: Do it when everyone needs a great laugh.
Practicing consistency is the key to stability. This means one can’t give up when it’s hard. Sometimes, you only need to remember who you are and find the one thing that will make those you care about laugh.
Thanks for the help.
Header Image by Aegis from Unsplash. A stock photo of a stock photo of a corporate handshake. Other Image by Kraken Images from Unsplash. A stock photo of a corporate high five.
