How humor helps (or why whimsy wins)

Greg Bulmash: Hello and welcome to How Humour Helps or Why Whimsy wins. I'm Greg Bulmash and you can find me online using the handle, Let My People Code. I'm here to talk about adding humour to your content and here's how you do it. Steal memes. Thank you. Goodnight. Okay, you might say, I can't do it. I'm not funny.

Steal memes, but steal memes. Immature artists, imitate mature artist steel. You know who said that? Genis Khan. Now we'll have more how-to content as we go along, but let's break down a few of the humour techniques used so far. Just in the first minute or so of this talk, there are four to point out. The first is the unexpected answer or oversimplification. You set people up to expect you to say something complex.

Then give them something unexpected and simple. We'll come back to this technique because it has a number of variations.

The second is the pretend ending. This is another variation on oversimplification or in a way doubling down on it. I just gave you the entire talk in two words and that's it. Thank you. Bye-Bye. The third is repeating a joke.

Now there's a fine line in humour between reinforcing a joke with repetition and running it into the ground, but when used correctly, repetition can make a joke funnier or carry through enough humour from the previous use. A variation on this technique is called the callback, and that would be landing this joke early. Then reusing this joke in 10 or 15 minutes or maybe right at the end.

Last is the obvious incongruity. Here it's attributing the quote to a false authority who is highly unlikely to have said it. Variations on this actual quote have been attributed to Pablo Picasso and TS Elliot, and if I'd cited either of them that could have added authority to the quote, but citing Genghis Khan can add levity and you don't have to use historical figures. You can also use a fictional character. You might even use one where people wonder, wait, did they say that?

Now, as someone who's seen the Princess Bride many, many times, let me assure you that this quote appearing in it is quite Now, some of you smiled at this slide, maybe even chuckled, but while the steel meme slide gave you something unexpected, every one of you who is familiar with the Princess Bride saw this slide coming at least a second or two before it hit the screen, but you still enjoyed it because it brought you in on the joke.

This is the kind of joke you don't want to use often because then your humour feels predictable in a bad way, but when you sparingly with some signal that you're expecting the audience to know where you're going, they feel like they're in on it, and that can make a predictable payoff, enjoyable instead of tiring. Now, when considering when and how to use humour in your talk or blog, the first question to ask is whether you should. Now, if I was just joking, my answer to the question on screen would be to steal a meme in this case, a parody of a meme just to make it a smidge more unexpected. Before I move on, I could explain the meme. This parodies give you a little history, but a primary rule of jokes is any joke you have to explain isn't funny, A shared joke, a laugh early on, can ease tension and bring the audience along on a journey with you rather than watching you walk the path alone.

Even more. If you're considered an authority figure or someone who might intimidate some members of the audience, it makes you more human and more relatable.

Benefit too of humour. What happens to an engine that's not lubricated? It seizes up a sprinkling of humour here and there can be like oil in an engine. It keeps things from getting too dry so the vehicle of your talk or blog moves along smoothly. Benefit three, a good laugh can not only make your talk memorable, but it can help you reinforce ideas. If you were going to take one bit of advice away from this talk so far, what would it be?

Now we've been through about a couple dozen slides, give or take. Anyone kept counting how many times I've used this one?

That was the 10th time. Now, if you grew up with this character currently on screen, maybe you heard his voice in your head, I could have read that out when the slide popped up. Then slides, but because his voice is going to be familiar to many, I let them hear it as they remember it and some of you will remember it differently than others because count fun count has been on a dozen or more national versions of Sesame Street. In my head, I hear the American count, but some of you heard the French count, the Japanese count, maybe even the Israeli count. You might've noticed there's another slide I didn't read earlier on because the character voice is so associated with that word that many of you heard 'em saying it. What word was that?

And a great meme to steal for tech talks is a response to that word. For example, I could say I think this talk is quite item potent.

Yes. I also bring a print out of this meme to coding interviews. I add a dozen slides going into when and where and why you shouldn't tell jokes, but the important considerations are really around whether a joke is appropriate. The first consideration is your audience. For example, everyone knows you do not tell jokes at airport security because they might not think you're joking. For example, this gag, I had to think about whether or not to use it. There's nothing controversial or taboo about the count to my knowledge, but I had to ask myself, how much of my audience is going to be familiar with this character? So I Googled them.

kfo count has been on enough national editions of Sesame Street.

I figured the odds were good. If you're giving a talk to a group you don't share cultural ties with, you might want to skip the jokes because they might land badly or you can Google their humour. And the second question is whether the joke is appropriate for the topic or setting. Sometimes a topic is too serious and levity just feels out of place or the theme of the site or conference is very serious. Some comedians would see that as a challenge, but in general, if you're talking about something most people consider serious and wouldn't find funny in that context, don't add jokes. For example, when you're presenting the postmortem of a high severity security incident, this is not appropriate.

And the last, I know it feels like this last one doesn't need to be said, but people have gotten fired over jokes.

Ask yourself, would you tell this joke in a meeting with hr? Also, just don't repeat any jokes you hear from politicians. They're likely to be divisive even if they seem innocuous, but enough of why not to use humour. Let's delve into some other sources of humour. For example, this one, IC P. I like to use it as a mnemonic. It stands for overly long, barely comprehensible, plainly made up almost unpronounceable acronym, and yes, I did Google it to make sure it did not exist elsewhere on the web, but seriously make a trend hashtag ic. Pua, any of you who took freshman physics in college heard this joke, is light a particle or a wave?

Yes. You probably didn't find it funny when your physics professor told it because it's one of those jokes that needs to be explained. But a method of oversimplification is to ask an either or question, then use yes as an unexpected shorthand for.

Do developers prefer to get their caffeine from coffee or Mountain Dew? Yes. Is react a backend or front end technology? Yes. Also back, another source of humour is finding a silly or cute way to express a common frustration.

Exaggeration can be funny. For example, this clip from a commercial combines an unexpected result with exaggeration. I'm not sure the audio is going to come through here, but it's a visual gag. Then there's rephrasing something serious to make it sound absurd or more absurd. For example, this gift from Monty Python and the Holy Grail rephrases, the legend of King Arthur's sword, things that are obviously out of place can provoke laughter like this GIF of Steve Bus me pretending to be a teenager.

That brings us into cluelessness and failure. They can be funny. For example, the Muppets character Fozzie Bear, his primary source of humour is the fact that he's a terrible comedian.

Another great source of failure, humour is animal fails. The caveat here is to use these for your own failures or the failure of a system. If you were talking about someone else's failure or mistake, this could go from funny to insulting and this is an important consideration. Whether the people the joke might reference would be insulted. For example, if you're talking about people following a trend, which of these gifts do you believe would be more appropriate in the abstract? I promise some brainstorming. It's a bit hard to do in this timeframe with a virtual presentation, so I'll simulate it and you can share your own ideas in the chat to entertain your fellow attendees.

Our topic since the last slide was about people following a trend is NFTs, and we'll apply some of the techniques we've covered to making up jokes about NFTs.

First, we'll go with the oversimplification. I used to start this talk. I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about NFTs. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed my talk. We can also use a variation on hashtag awa, make it trend people, but since we already have the acronym, we can change the words instead. NFTs stands for naturally flavorful tacos or maybe NFTs stands for Nutty fish Tricks. Now remember folks, we're brainstorming here.

Not all of them are going to be winners.

I don't know about you, but I found some of the prices paid for NFTs to be absurd, so why not work with that for an absurdity joke? Or maybe you can borrow a common meme image and add your own text to rephrase the concept. For example, playing on the perceived absurdity of paying big bucks for something that can be easily copied. No one needs to send me angry corrections. I know it's the image that can be copied, but the token is unique and that's what you're paying for. I tell my artist friends, it's like a certificate of authenticity. I get it.

I'm just having fun with it.

So we've come to the end and I'm going to reinforce my slide title with a visual pun. I know 15 minutes isn't a lot of time, but I hope you got a few useful hints and if there's one thing you should take away from this talk, it's use callbacks. Thank you for joining my virtual DevRel con talk. Find me online, follow me, say hi. I'll leave this up for a second If you want to screen cap it, you can also find my slides on my GitHub and in the words of the philosophers, bill s Preston and Ted Theodore Logan. Be excellent to each other and party on dudes. Thank you.