Extraordinary Vocabulary, Word #2: Laughter

After writing about the low use of the word Modesty in the workplace, I realized this could become a series of articles. There’s an extraordinary vocabulary that is vastly ignored by us marketers at work. In recent weeks, one boggled my mind with severe intensity:

Laughter.

Laughter makes people healthier, wealthier and sexier. Laughter makes people better learners and better leaders. Laughter is the most powerful trigger of decision making and content sharing. Laughter, of all reactions an audience could have to an ad, is far the most positive one we could aim for - it’s directly linked to distinctiveness and overall ad performance. It beats cry, shiver and fright, just to name a few other bodily signals of human emotion. Ultimately, laughter could make us better marketers.

Yet, only 3 of 27 campaigns that won a Grand Prix in Cannes in 2022 used humor - Apple’s “Escape from the office”, ironically, was one of them. In the combined 2020/2021 edition, only 1 of 38 GP winners used humor (“Can’t touch this”, for Cheetos, GP in Creative Strategy). You don’t need to sign up for The Work to check if my assessment is accurate. Just flick through your LinkedIn feed. My guess? Only 1% of the posts will make you laugh.?

This frantic over-debating may be forcing us to stay uptight; this constant over-exhibition may be making us pretend we’re professionals at everything; this highly political atmosphere - in the broad sense of the word - may be driving a fear of our laughter to sound tone deaf. Or maybe it’s the pandemic paired with the war in Ukraine paired with school shootings… that made us rightly more cautious with making use of laughter.

In this BBC Culture article about humor in times of war, the author Nicholas Barber wonders: “The chance of alienating viewers with war comedies does raise another question: why make them at all? Isn’t it walking through a minefield, so to speak, to try to get laughs from such a potentially upsetting topic? Wouldn’t it be easier to put the same characters in an office or a shop?”.

While you ask yourself a version of Barber’s question above, you will be surprised with TeenVogue’s “Memes and War: Why People Turn to Jokes During Times of Crisis” article on how Gen Z is using humor on TikTok to “post through” tough times. Or as it states - “Memes may offer a dose of cathartic psychological relief”. It’s arguably what The Onion - known for its satirical approach to all news - believes so. They have republished the same headline on mass shootings 21 times since 2014.?

In fact, comedy as a passion point has boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the reason why Netflix is so invested in the genre via its “Netflix is a Joke” program. Having last year picked up record-breaking 20 nominations at the Emmys, Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso” will compete with the same amount of nominations in 2022 with its second season. John Krasinski’s “Some Good News” YouTube channel, created at the very beginning of the pandemic (March 29, 2020), accumulated 330,000 subscribers overnight. It has today 2.47M subscribers, and videos with up to 20M views.

Humor isn’t one-dimensional. There’s that insensitive, aggressive, irresponsible, politically-incorrect type of humor that we all see around these days. There’s that judgemental laugh-at-people type. There’s that LOL-for-the-sake-of-it type. But these types all sit at the extreme of a very eclectic spectrum of types of humor that exist out there.

In 2020, a team of GUT strategists including Bruno Steffen, Nathalia Oliveira and myself did a study of Humor in the United States using a multi-method research approach combining audience insights from Facebook Insights, Winnin, Upfluence and streaming services. We landed on 9 verticals of Humor ranging from Harmless, to Brocom, to Late Night, to Dramedy, just to name a few of them. It not only provided us with a map of humor as a passion point in the country, it also revealed humor as a value, more than a tone of voice.

Humor is more nuanced than ever, and within that plethora there are laughs for good: not for the sake of it, but with a purpose. To laugh with people and to make people laugh with you is a white space in the brandscape. It’s also an urgent call for us marketers to put our guards down a bit, and take ourselves a little less seriously. As you’ve read, it pays off at the end. Above it all, it pays off in the process.

And sorry this article could have been funnier.