Experts teach funny business
Goal is to enable Bay Area companies to develop humor
SAN FRANCISCO — More than 200 Bay Area professionals packed into a trendy San Francisco music hall Thursday to learn a skill that’s become increasingly important in the tech industry and beyond — how to be funny.
As brands crowd the Internet and social media, competing for consumers’ attention, more companies are turning to humor as a way to stand out, said David Nihill, who works with companies to make their material funnier.
“There was a lot of content being put out that was just kind of boring in nature, and I just felt that it didn’t need to be,” said Nihill, who founded San Francisco-based FunnyBizz two years ago.
The company held its fourth FunnyBizz Conference on Thursday at The Chapel, an old mortuary turned into a live music venue in San Francisco’s Mission District. Attendees heard from a range of wellknown funny people — who frequently had the audience in stitches — about what makes content funny and
how humor can promote a brand.
Speakers included Scott Dikkers, founder of satirical website TheOnion.com, and Sarah Cooper of comedy site The Cooper Review. The atmosphere was an odd mashup of a bawdy comedy club and a business conference — presenters unabashedly swore and told sex jokes to get their points across, while attendees dutifully copied down notes from the speakers’ PowerPoint slides.
“Don’t try to be funny,” Cooper suggested. “Try to be honest. Just say exactly what’s happening, and you’ll get that laughter of recognition.”
Several Bay Area companies already are incorporating humor into their message. San Francisco-based ride-hailing company Lyft is releasing a series of funny videos that feature celebrities going undercover as Lyft drivers. In one of the most recent posts, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal wears various disguises as he shuttles unsuspecting passengers around Atlanta. Zendesk, a San Franciscobased customer service software company, created a website, zendeskalternative.com, dedicated to a fake alternative rock band of the same name. The company even promoted the band’s album: “On the surface, it’s a collection of songs about customer service. Underneath, it’s about so much more.”
Businesses traditionally have feared using humor because of the risks it can pose, Nihill said. But these days, even President Barack Obama is jumping on board — think the recent silly video of his discussing his retirement plans with former House Speaker John Boehner.
“A lot of companies you wouldn’t expect have put effort into making things a bit more entertaining,” Nihill said.
Nihill said that type of playfulness is especially important on platforms such as Facebook, where people go to see and interact with their friends and don’t want their fun interrupted by boring, traditional ads.
Cartoonist Tom Fishburne, another speaker at Thursday’s conference, has drawn funny cartoon ads for tech clients including LinkedIn, IBM and Kronos. Fishburne, who runs cartoon-driven marketing firm Marketoonist, says his work focuses on pain-points instead of solutions because pain-points are funnier.
Nihill, a Dubliner with a thick Irish accent that seems to make any joke he tells onstage funnier, swears there’s hope for even the stodgiest executive.
“Can it be taught? It definitely can, when you have the right people teaching it,” Nihill said. “Because at the end of the day, humor is a skill. And if it’s a skill, that means it can be learned.”
Redwood City-based software company Alation sent its marketing and design teams to the conference Thursday to hone their humor skills. Marketing manager Jeff Haber particularly enjoyed hearing the first speaker of the day analyze what makes something funny from a researcher’s perspective. Haber said Alation already experiments with humor — sending out the occasional email with an amusing subject line, for example.
“For us, our voice has to sound unique,” he said, “because in technology there are so many different ways to solve a problem, and there are five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 or 11 companies doing the same thing.”