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I listened to an episode of the How I Write podcast with Scott Dikkers, the founding editor of The Onion, and it inspired the whole idea for this Lunch Break.
I tend to think I’m naturally funny, so I can’t relate to non-funny people. But good news for them: Scott says funny is a skill you can learn, and it starts with your point.
You figure out what you're really saying first, and the humor is how you say it. That’s good news because it means you're not sitting there waiting to be hilarious. You might be waiting forever… All you have to do is dress up what you’re saying.
Dikkers sorts it all into 11 filters. Here’s how he describes them:
Irony. The intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning.
Character. A comedic character acting on their personality traits.
Reference. Common experiences the audience can relate to.
Shock. Surprise pulled from sex, drugs, gross-out humor, or swearing.
Parody. Mimicking a familiar character, trope, or cliché in an unfamiliar way.
Hyperbole. Exaggeration to absurd extremes.
Wordplay. Puns, rhymes, double entendres, and the like.
Analogy. Comparing two disparate things.
Madcap. Crazy, wacky, silly, nonsensical.
Metahumor. Jokes about jokes, or about the idea of comedy.
Misplaced focus. Attention focused on the wrong thing.
Some are built for satire and would look unhinged in a LinkedIn post. Three of them are the easiest to use in a normal post, so let me show you each one and how you'd use it this week.
Analogy. Take your point and hold it up next to an everyday moment everybody knows. Say your message is that dropping "Great post!" on everything keeps you stuck at hello, so you never build a real relationship with anyone. Written flat, that's forgettable. As an analogy, it becomes: "Leaving 'Great post!' on everyone's stuff is like re-introducing yourself to a coworker every time you pass them in the hall. You keep starting over at hi and never get to actually knowing each other." It’s the same point, except now they can picture it, and it makes them smile. To build your own, take what you're describing and ask what it reminds you of in real life. The more specific and familiar the comparison, the better it lands.
Reference. Point at something everyone recognizes so the right people feel noticed. A good example is using a meme. A screenshot from a show or a pop-culture moment with no words on it, and your caption is the perfect match for what's happening in the picture. When it lands, it's the best thing on the feed all day. You can do this with a text-based post, too. Just name an experience so specific people go "wait, that's me," which is exactly what we got into last week.
Hyperbole. Exaggerate so far past what's real that the size of it becomes the joke. When something gets under your skin, reach for the impossible version. You didn't just roll your eyes. You rolled them so hard you almost did a backflip. Nobody takes it literally, and that's why it works.
This week, I'm going to challenge you to write the post you were already going to write, find the one real point in it, and run it through one of these three, or take a look at the other eight and find your right fit.
I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised with how people react.
Oh, and I’m excited to say that I was the first US company to share a press release using the Capital Markets Dad network. You can read it here :)
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