That's Not Funny!

But, it made me laugh.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

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E@RTC has formed a new board to take over for me and I’m really happy with the initial members. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be transferring all duties to other volunteers and one of those transfers is the blog itself.

Dave Prevedel, who has taken over for me as Managing Partner, and I were talking about the challenges in writing humor and getting someone to do it in their own voice. It’s hard. Whoever they find will have to create their own unique niche and Dave will give it a shot.

It’s basically the same challenge from last week’s post about pushing the boundaries of art. You have to get past the constraints of good manners and personal refinement and just go for it, knowing someone somewhere will be offended even if you just say, “hello.” That’s the tightrope you walk. Someone is always offended about something.

Humor is what gets me through the difficult spots and it’s also what I enjoy about running a company. I like to keep things fun and people laughing easily. It’s just a better way to work.

Somewhere in our society, we decided that the problem with humor was the offender and not the offendee. How did that ever happen? If I was offended by something as a kid, my parents would have slapped me upside the head and said, “Snap out of it, don’t act selfish!” I’d say to my dad, “Okay, I won’t be shellfish.” He never heard me or at least he never let on. As a kid, that was funny stuff in my head. I ran with the shellfish joke for a long time.

The problem was, we didn’t have an easy time as kids when we moved back to the US and our parents wanted to get us a little more resilient in the real world. I didn’t understand at the time, but I do now. If we got our faces pushed in on the way home from school, it was our problem. Humor got me through a lot of bad stuff, even if nobody else thought it was funny.

My parents were not big on letting anything be about us kids anyway. They practiced the “kids should be seen and not heard” method of raising us. I realized as an adult that they didn’t want us to become brats and thought a lot about us learning to do things bigger than ourselves.

They later said over dinner one night that they thought it would set us up for failure in life. If you’re constantly offended by something, chances are really good you’re the problem and likely the narcissist who will never be happy with the world. Still, it’s how the world shifted, which is a shame. If you’re offended, it’s everyone else’s problem, not yours. See the issue?

I don’t see comedians as funny as I once did. They don’t take the same risks. Even Bill Cosby couldn’t talk today about Fat Albert. Risks will keep them off Netflix or HBO.

In the movie “The Guard,” Brendan Gleeson’s character is called a racist. He doesn’t flinch and says “I’m Irish sure. Racism’s a part of my culture.” I burst out laughing when I heard it. I’m part Irish. The joke was funny, but it completely defused the argument while self deprecating at the same time. I thought it was a brilliant line.

I remember seeing comedians who’d make me cry laughing. I can’t think of a time when that happened recently. It’s not that you have to be the crudest comedian, but you can’t worry about offending anyone and still be funny. I find most comedians to be fairly flat these days for all the same reasons. You can’t make Mel Brooks movies like “Blazing Saddles” or “High Anxiety” or even “Young Frankenstein” anymore and they are still funny to me.

When I write humor I have no idea how it’s going to land. As I’ve said so many times, it takes ten times longer to write humor than something very dry or what’s regarded as normal now. Even when I think something is funny, I’ll often come back to it the next day and ask myself, “What the hell was I thinking?” Often this means flattening out my writing and with it goes something really side-splitting, at least to me. There have been dozens of times when I revised the E@RTC blog at the last minute because I was afraid a joke wouldn’t land and I’d wake up in someone’s trunk. Usually it was something I wrote where I laughed until I cried.

You can’t write funny for everyone either. You have to know your narrow audience and write to them. For me, the volunteers were my primary target until a few of them were not so fun after they joined us.

When we started out, I constantly made fun of how we looked and smelled. Then it became a real challenge to write because of a few who didn’t get the joke, and that in a way contributed to my departure. It wasn’t my culture anymore. It became something else because of a few. One volunteer loudly complained about my Fresno jokes and asked me to stop. I ignored him anyway believing he was shamefully from Fresno. There is a secret behind the Fresno jokes and they are all a nod to Carol Burnett.

When the TV show Dallas was the most watched television drama, Carol Burnett created a spoof series called “Fresno.” It’s my nod to her and her humor. Nobody ever made me laugh harder than her growing up. She will always be the queen of humor for me. Every time I wrote a Fresno joke I thought of making her laugh. My very first Fresno joke was when you look at Fresno on Google Maps all the houses spell “HELP!”

To make writing funny for the E@RTC blog, I’d write down ideas as I’m out and about. I have a notes page on my phone where I’ll write out the joke. For example, I’ll often lead the news with “This is more exciting than...” but I don’t know what to say after that, so I walk around and go about my day until I can come up with the rest of the sentence. I was at Chipotle. There was the remainder of the joke. “This is more exciting than a bathroom line at Chipotle!...Madonna’s plastic surgery...eating twice in one day at Taco Bell...” AI cannot finish the sentence so I never use it for help with humor.

Sometimes I’ll write a sentence and the words completely throw off the comic timing. If I say, “You’re the practice pancake” it’s funny. But if I write, “they are the practice pancakes of the automotive world,” it lands differently, especially when I lead with another putdown.

So often I’ll sit and work on something over and over until it’s unique and funny. I don’t steal other people’s work and if I hear something before as I did when I heard the expression “practice pancakes” I can work with that and turn it into a better joke. I just read someone’s insult, “You probably clap with your fingers spread apart.” I died laughing. I could get away with that one on the blog if I thought of it.

I notice I find things funnier when I’m overtired so my best writing would be on nights when I couldn’t sleep. Keep me up late and the humor just pours out. I’ll usually wince by morning. I have a pillow over my head while I’m regretting I have a mouth. My brother can make everything sound funny just because of the way he delivers the line. It can be anything, but out of his mouth it just works with perfect comic timing. That’s hard to get down in writing.

The funniest stuff I write by far can’t be released to the general public. I have a sometimes very dark streak, but I really laugh. There is so much I’d love to write about cancer, but it’s just too dark. I can say something like, I was in the basement of the hospital trying to think of something as I watched them saw the foot off a dead guy. That will hit a lot of people differently. It’s sort of like eating chicken feet I guess. My hospital shirt says, “future ghost.” I hear the uncomfortable laugh.

The problem with finding a new writer for E@RTC is that it’s not only a lot of work, they have to practice at comic timing in the writing itself and maybe they can find someone who just naturally just nails it. I suggested someone I know who comes very close, but they may be in a conflict of interest situation. Dave will think about it. They must do it in their own voice or it won’t work either.

I’d love to keep writing humor on my other Substack page and as it is I’ve not written anything there in a long time. There are two reasons. One is the hours it takes to write humor, but the other is even under a pen name, I don’t want to offend someone while in my CEO role, which is something I take very seriously. I can use the excuse “it wasn’t me, it was the other guy who wrote it,” but that may not fly. I can argue that it’s a character, which it is, and sometimes that can make it easier to write.

I think of all the people booted out of major companies just because something they thought at the time was funny turned out to not be politically correct. It’s a shame really. Did Tony Blevins deserve to be fired from Apple for quoting a line from a TV series? While he wasn’t my favorite guy at Apple at all, I still thought his firing was a bit much and he was a serious car guy.

We need more CEOs with a good sense of humor. I actually think it boosts the relationship with the CEO and the other employees, and the company benefits, even if they miss once in a while. Some jokes only land in context. I also don’t want to hire any employee or work side by side with a narcissist who’s offended by everything in life. People like that are tedious and besides it takes all the joy out of work. I much prefer working alongside people who laugh easily and aren’t offended by much. Don’t you?

I wish it was easier to make people laugh but today it’s just not. It’s real work. I think laughing is what we all need, but doing it today is very risky so I hope they find the right person who doesn’t care and just goes for it. I did my best at E@RTC, but believe me, I was always holding back. I kind of hope that whoever they find doesn’t, and I read something that makes me laugh.