CAN THIS CONFERENCE TEACH BRANDS HOW TO BE FUNNY?
WHEN
MARKETING RELIES ON HUMAN CONNECTION, HUMOR IS A PROFITABLE
ENTERPRISE.
Even
though it’s 9:00 a.m. on a bright fall morning, FunnyBizz feels
more like a nightclub than a conference. Inside a trendy Brooklyn
performance space, the lights are dimmed, the main floor is covered
in water (part of the décor), and islands of round tables, usually
scattered with beer bottles and cocktail napkins, accommodate scads
of smartphones and
laptops. Groggy businesspeople pick up their orange juice and
pastries from boxes on the bar.
The
mission of FunnyBizz, which hosted its first conferences in San
Francisco earlier this year, is as seemingly contradictory as its
ambiance. On
the FunnyBizz website,
it promises to teach businesses—which are increasingly looking to
connect with consumers through content, social
media,
and viral
marketing—the
“essential principles of comedy, improv and storytelling” that
allow them to “tap into humor’s power.”
Teaching
anyone to be funny sounds like a fool’s errand. Teaching businesses
to have a sense of humor seems downright impossible.
But David
Nihill,
the conference’s cofounder, offers himself as a success story.
Though he swears he had terrible stage fright before taking it upon
himself to study the strategies of comedy (an adventure he
recently turned
into a book),
his entrance showed no signs of distress, as he charmingly introduced
the event in a thick Irish accent. “If I say something funny and
you don’t laugh,” he jokes, “I’m just going to assume you
didn’t understand.”
Of
course, the crowd laughs.
Could
teaching brands to funny really be so easy?
THE FORMULA FOR FUNNY
“The
first step to becoming more humorous,” says Peter
McGraw,
"is to believe that you can become more humorous.” He nods to
a slide behind him that shows an art student’s self-portrait
evolving from terrible to passable over time. “A sense of humor is
a skill that can be developed in the same way that drawing can be
developed.”
McGraw
is a marketing and psychology professor at the University
of Colorado Boulder who
studies what makes things funny. He has literally boiled humor down
to a formula, which he calls the “benign violation theory.” The
secret, he says, is framing something potentially threatening in a
way that makes it actually okay.
Take
a sign that you might have seen in a café or a general store:
“Unattended children will be given a Red Bull and a free puppy.”
If you make it entirely benign, it’s just, “please no unattended
children.” Not funny. If you make it entirely a violation, it turns
into, “Unattended children will be sold as slaves.” Also not
funny. It’s the combination of the two that works—adjust
accordingly for what your audience sees as a violation.
Of
course, the idea that being funny is a skill that can be worked out
like your algebra homework hasn’t been embraced by many comedians.
Marc Maron, for instance,told
McGraw that
he thinks “benign violation is an apt metaphor for a relationship
with an audience.” Louis CK, McGraw says, reacted to the theory by
saying, “Well, I just don’t think it’s that simple.”
McGraw
calls this type of opposition self-serving. “If you’re a
comedian, you want the mystery,” he says. “You don’t want
science pulling back the curtain. It’s the same way that a magician
doesn’t want people to know how the trick is done.”
Throughout
FunnyBizz, speakers pile on to the point that humor is a skill that
can be taught by providing their own formulas.
Kat
Koppett,
an actress who has been performing improv for more than 25 years,
instructs brands to find their stories by asking a few questions:
What do I want [my audience] to do differently? What do they care
about? What’s in it for them? “After you ask those questions,”
she says, “you make your story, and change the world.”
Andrew
Tarvin,
who teaches
companies improve techniques,
argues for borrowing other people’s humor if you can’t pull it
off yourself. “There is a difference between skill of humor and
sense of humor,” he says. “We don’t have to have great skill,
just a sense. Because then we can find things on the Internet, and as
long as we give them credit, we can use them in our slide show."
He nods to the photo behind him.
Allison
Goldberg and Jen Jamula, who started a sketch comedy show
called Blogologues that
takes all of its dialogue from the Internet, suggest repurposing
content by “taking it further” (a gorilla
drumming to Phil Collins)
or “taking the opposite” (James
Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell reading a teenager’s Facebook
feed).
“Iterate,
iterate, iterate, and don’t be afraid to fail,” instructs Jodie
Ellis, who helped Optimizely, a company that is in the decidedly
boring business of A/B testing, create a rapper persona for its
marketing efforts ("MC Commerce").
Television
writer and producer Bill
Grundfest,
a Golden Globe winner and three-time Emmy nominee, has the
most paint-by-numbers approach.
He says that every good story boils down to this concept: “Who
wants what and what stops them from getting it.”
Then
he rattles off his phone number. “Send me a text message and I will
send you the magic template,” he tells the audience.
When
I text the number a couple of days later, someone responds six
minutes later with a list labeled “Bill Grundfest’s Magic Story
Template.
“That’s
it! Of course 20 different writers will give you 20 different
scripts.”
FUNNY BUSINESS
So
why pay to be told these instructions in person? “Because I’m not
funny,” says one attendee, when I ask her why she came to the
FunnyBizz Conference. She’s a psychotherapist who blogs, and she’s
hoping to learn something that can help jazz up her writing. I also
meet a couple of startup founders who are hoping to make their
pitches to investors more compelling, a speaking coach, one real
estate agent,
and copywriters. So many copywriters.
Yet,
judging by audience participation, the crowd is not composed of
natural comedians.
It's
after lunch by the time Grundfest takes the stage. He has promised to
reveal the sitcom-scripting secrets that will turn our brands'
stories into compelling videos, and he's looking for an example to
use as a demonstration. "What problem is your company trying to
solve?" he asks. The real estate agent raises her hand and, when
called on, mumbles that she thought maybe she would make a joke about
“homelessness” but that she didn't think it would be funny. She’s
right. Another man raises his hand to let Grundfest know that even if
someone gets his manager’s approval for a script ahead of time,
there’s a 50/50 chance the boss won’t approve it in the end
anyway. Also not funny.
And
this was well after several formulas for humor have been revealed.
Grundfest,
who founded the comedy club that launched comedians like Jon Stewart
and Ray Romano, is by contrast very good at being funny. “This
bright eyes and bushy-tailed man has shared the view that no matter
what we do, we're doomed,” he jokes after the man’s comment. “All
right coach, I'm ready to go play the second half.”
The
professional comedian and storyteller is funny. The audience is not.
This probably isn’t a surprise, but aren’t we here to learn what
can be done?
“We
want to understand how humor can help your business and we give you
some tools to apply it straightaway if you stay for the whole day,”
Nihill says. But there’s another option. “Worst case scenario,
we’ll give you access to the leading experts in that area if you
want to hire somebody and bring them in and get them to help you.”
Besides
the conference, FunnyBizz makes money by farming out non-funny
content from brands to about 15 freelance comedians and copywriters
who can make it funny. Nihill and his partner, Rachman Blake, only
started this side a couple of months ago, but they say they get about
10 to 15 jobs per week, including funny-izing website copy, press
releases, and wedding
speeches.
In
one presentation they worked on, the presenter began by showing a
video that outlined his considerable accomplishments. “It made him
less human to everyone who was there,” Nihill says. “His
successes were so spectacular. And then when he would make jokes
after that, it was hard for people to laugh.” The writer advised
the presenter to use some self-deprecating humor after showing the
video. Now after it plays, he says, “Just so you know, my mother
made that video. If my wife had made it, it would be a very different
story.”
It’s
not just FunnyBizz’s creators who have started businesses based on
brands' desire to be funny. Most FunnyBizz presenters also run some
sort of consultancies for humor, which they are at the conference, in
part, to promote. Allison Goldberg and Jen Jamula sell sponsored
sketches for Blogologues, in which they repurpose, say, Yelp reviews
related to a specific business that pays for the privilege. Andrew
Tarvin teaches humor skills to companies, and has taught classes at
places like General
Assembly.
Kat
Koppett runs a consultancy that
helps companies apply improv technique to everything from public
speaking to meeting facilitation. Even Bill Grundfest adds to his
magic template a reminder that “of course I’m doing workshops and
corporate speaking, for which you can get me directly
atbgrundfest@gmail.com.”
And
all of them were also, without exception, funny. True to the
conference staff T-shirts, which promise to “abolish boring
conferences,” attendees were thoroughly infotained at FunnyBizz.
And even if the professionals in attendance didn’t transform into
comedians themselves, the fact that they stayed until the end of the
day did prove a key point.
“Whatever
business you think you’re in, you’re in show business,”
Grundfest explains. “Whatever you want, whoever tells the best
story wins.”
Even
if you’re putting on a conference, apparently.
BYSARAH
KESSLER
http://www.fastcompany.com/3038036/can-this-conference-teach-brands-how-to-be-funny?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11102014
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