Funny is binary.

When I was a kid, I would try jokes out on my Mom.

She had a great laugh, and an even better sense of humour. I'd come home from school, we'd get out two spoons and eat from the same tub of ice cream while I tried to make her laugh.

One day, a friend of mine told me a joke that had the F-word in it. It wasn't a gratuitous F-word either. The joke literally depended on it. I thought it was a great joke and wanted to try it out on my Mom but I was wary about the F-bomb as I was 12 years old, and in 1976 "fuck" wasn't quite as liberally sprinkled into our conversation as it is now.

But I went ahead with it anyway.

And it killed. Huge laughs. The first thing she said to my Dad when he came home from work was: "Ang! Tell your Dad that joke you just told me!" He dug it too, so it was a win-win all around. Having landed the joke so well, I inquired whether this was now the official green-light to say "fuck" on the regular.

My Mom gave me the look: "Only if it makes a joke funnier."

What she was saying (beyond "No, you can't swear anytime you want") was that you don't half-ass a joke. Funny is hard enough. Getting someone to LOL IRL is really hard. And it's impossible if someone is pulling back on the funny reins.

And this happens ALL the time in advertising.

I can count on three hands the number of times I've heard a client say to me after hearing a bunch of funny scripts: "Yeah, uhmm, with the next round of work, we'd like to see something fun, not funny." The silence that followed would sometimes be so uncomfortable, they would attempt to clarify their request with: "You know, a smile, not a laugh."

When you hear this in your career, and you will, you may be tempted to do a lot of things (scream, cry, rage, etc) but what you CANNOT do is what they asked.

Because "fun, not funny" is like saying "mediocre, not good".

And no one wants to do a mediocre ad, not even the client who is unwittingly asking for it. So when you do hear the "fun, not funny" feedback, you have one of two options.

Option 1 is to just take funny off the table. There is always another way to skin a cat, so just say "OK, cool. We can see that you aren't comfortable with funny, so we'll look at some other ways to go. Funny is just one route, we'll look at other ways to tackle the brief."

When you say that, the client will often say "No! No! We want to have some fun with it. We just don't want to go too far."

"Great!", you might think, "If we just throttle back on the funny a bit, we can sell this idea." But you can't do that because when you pull back on the funny, you very often eliminate the thing that made it funny in the first place. And right there, is the rub.

Funny is binary. It is or it isn't.

You can't half-ass funny. You have to go far to find it. If you just go halfway there, you end up in the same places everyone ends up. Dopey Dads. Talking dogs. Zany Grandmas. Nosey neighbours. Idiot bosses. All the stuff that hasn't been funny since the mid-80's.

Being actually funny (aka. Option 2) means going where other brands won't.

Like into your parent's bedroom when you get home from school in this classic for Ragu. The clients could have dialled this one back. They could have said "We love 'the long day of childhood' insight but that one with Mom and Dad having sex in the bedroom? We can't go there. What if they were just making out on the couch?"

It could so easily have been Mom and Dad on the couch. And it would have sucked.

Because it would have been un-true. No kid was ever traumatized by seeing their parents kissing. Kissing might get an eye-roll and maybe an "Ewwwwwww", but what that Ragu kid saw? You're damn right he needed America's Favourite Pasta Sauce.

Check out this recent spot for Tubi. If you're too busy to watch it, I'll summarize: whether you're a sweet-hearted small business owner or a heavily-steroided mafia thug, everyone is entitled to Tubi's free streaming.

You know what? I don't care if you're busy, watch the spot. It's a master class on comedic storytelling. The rug-pull, the VO, the music, the writing ("...even though they have wives") is note perfect.

I can only imagine the conversation that might have ensued after presenting this one to the client. "Do they have to destroy the guy's place?" (Yes!) "Do we need the girlfriends/wives reference?" (Absolutely!) "Doesn't this look like we kind of support mafia intimidation?" (Only if you take this spot exceptionally literally.)

The idea would have 'worked' if the thugs just stood threateningly in the doorway of the old guy's shop. But it wouldn't have worked well.

It might have been 'polite smile' funny. Or 'Dad joke' funny. Or 'kinda funny for a commercial' funny. But 'make people laugh who don't give a damn about your product or your ad' funny? That's a different kind of funny.

Which is the only kind of funny there is.