What Humor DOESN’T Mean
The best advice I’ve ever received in the realm of content creation is that we have to be entertaining. If you’re not entertaining, then you’re wasting your time.
I truly believe this, yet I’ve found that a lot of people simply don’t understand what it means to be “entertaining.” They think it means to “break out the circus monkeys”, tell jokes at every possible moment, otherwise people are going to check out.
I think that that is as far from the truth as you can get. I think if that’s your attitude and if that’s the way that you approach creating content, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot. The “pander to the lowest common denominator” approach will alienate your audience (or what’s left of it) very quickly.
Now there is a time and a place for humor, and it is definitely useful in certain situations. You can lighten up a really heavy discussion with a joke, perhaps a funny anecdote of some sort.
But what I want to talk about today is what humor is. And more importantly, what humor is not.
Humor means that you are making something relatable to humans; not necessarily that you’re going to laugh your petewty off.
One of my favorite jokes is the one about the Siamese twins who move to England so the other one could drive.
If you hear it for the first time, it’s funny because you think about these Siamese twins who live in America. The twin on the right always feels shortchanged because her sister on the left always gets to drive. So they have these big arguments and finally they just decide to settle the argument by moving to England.
Now the other one gets to drive.
You’re not going to laugh out loud at it, but it does make you chuckle a little bit. More importantly, it makes you think about the humanity of these two people who have this physical disadvantage. They’re probably advantaged in ways that that we’re not, but that’s not the point. There’s this struggle, and then the redemption by resolving the situation by relocating to a place where the twin on the right can drive.
The story is completely ridiculous, but it give us an image of humanity to which we can relate. It makes us think about who we are as people. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to go for a laugh. It just means that you’re being relatable. It means that you are making people think about things of importance.
You can’t get turned off because people don’t laugh or they don’t smile (especially when performing in the Midwest). A lot of times people don’t react at all, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not thinking. It doesn’t mean that they’re not internalizing your message, the deep meaning of what you’ve said.
Entertaining means being engaging, captivating. You use things like humor or jokes as tools to keep people’s attention, to keep people engaged with what you’re saying, but it doesn’t mean that you’re just going for the bad joke at every possible minute. I would say that it means anything but that.
Just a random thought passing through my mind this fine Tuesday. I hope you were entertained 😉 By the way, I share a lot of my deep and undeep thoughts on my recently renamed podcast, This Is What We C.R.A.V.E. There’s an interesting story behind the name change, one I’ll be sharing on the podcast very soon. So you might want to bookmark this link and subscribe to the show so you can hear my thoughts on the matter when it’s released.
https://jamesdnewcomb.com/podcast