Can worthwhile technical content be... funny?

Thirty seconds into my tech talk about text mining the producer stopped me. "You need to wiggle your hips more" he said. So as I discussed part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization I made sure to give an exaggerated shake.

This is the sort of direction that may seem at odds with professional videos about technical topics, but in the IBM lightboard video studio where I present each week it has become common place. A couple weeks back a cartoon helmet was animated onto my head. The month prior I dressed up in two outfits and conducted a conversation on camera with myself.

Is humor appropriate in a professional technical discussion?

When we wanted to describe the concept of how artificial intelligence transformers worked, we had the computer come up with a punchline. A GPT-3 algorithm wrote a joke about a banana crossing the road.

Doesn't this all seem a little... unprofessional? An unnecessary distraction that gets in the way of communicating important technical concepts? The feedback so far tells a different story.

Your technical information is worthless if nobody sees it

The easiest thing to do when reading a whitepaper or watching a video is... to stop. Storytelling and narrative can be a hugely effective way to draw a person in. Let's look at an example. Which of the two articles about data mining hold your attention?

Data mining is the process of extracting valuable information from large datasets. It's used in a variety of industries, from marketing to healthcare, as it can help businesses to make more informed decisions.?

Or...

If you've even been panning for gold you'll know that it takes a lot of time and effort to find even a small nugget. It's estimated that to extract enough gold?to make a single?golden ring?you need to sort through around 26 tons of rock. That's a lot to sift through. The same is true when mining data, except the gold is replaced with insights, and the panning is replaced with algorithms.

I'm willing to bet that a narrative about mining for gold kept you more engaged. Throw that in to a video with a fun animation of the speaker wearing a miner's helmet and you have an opening where people are more likely to stick around. And here's the thing - in the video where we used this gold mining analogy the very next thing we said was the text in first example there - the boring one defining what data mining is. But you, dear reader, are now primed to consume this content.

Is nothing sacred?

No matter how dry the subject matter, engagement can probably be improved by injecting a little humor. My colleague Jeff Bisti and I adapted a technical discussion about COBOL intrinsic functions into an infomercial ad "but wait, there's more!". IBM VP Paul Zikopoulos used an incident at an award show to illustrate a point about career guidance.

We're all lifelong learners. And as we consume content to ever improve our corpus of knowledge it doesn't hurt if we can be entertained just a little along the way.