Before kicking off: last month I said I’d make B&H a fortnightly, rather than a weekly newsletter. But I’ve heard a bit of pushback on this: nothing major (hey, let’s face it, I’m not Taylor Swift) but enough to make me do a rethink.
Taylor Swift (above). Not to be confused with Paddy Gilmore (below).
So, long story short, it’s a weekly again. What’s more, I love writing it and kinda missed the weekly routine.
So! Down to business…
***
On 13th July, this happened:
…Within hours, there was the reaction on social. On Twitter/X alone you could see this:
Or this…
Or this…
While on Instagram there was this.
The intention of all these social posts, of course, is to be funny. But in a way the quality and style of the humour doesn’t interest me here. What interests me are the two words at the top of each post:
In other words, when is it too soon to make a joke out of a major news event?1
Mark Twain, the great humorist and avid moustache-grower, once said that ‘humor is tragedy plus time.’ But, as we’ll discover, it’s a little more complex than that…
1. When distance helps.
This is, in essence, Mark Twain’s view. To put it on a more humdrum level, think of a cringe-worthy thing you did when you were a teenager2. Horrible at the time, sure. But now? You and your mates laugh about it. Well, your mates do.
On a more global level, this is a scene from the First World War.
And this is a scene from a comedy about the First World War: the great BBC sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth (1989). It is an extraordinary two-and-a-half minutes of comedy, showing how humour emerges not from cheerfulness but from the horror of facing death. Blackadder is due to be executed by firing-squad, when he has some unexpected visitors…
2. Sometimes, though, time isn’t on your side — and can hurt humour.
“You had to be there.” We’ve all heard this when someone tells an anecdote and it’s greeted with this (even if mentally):
Or try this little thought experiment: imagine you told a joke about the Black Death to your friends. Would it be funny? No, because most people only have a vague idea about the Black Death. (Indeed, if this includes you, here’s a wee footnote about it3).
3. Sometimes humour hurts, then helps, then hurts again.
This might sound very confusing, but it mainly applies to big news events. Humour can feel insensitive, then it can feel acceptable, but then — several weeks after the event — if can feel just, well, boring.
Take the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in 1997. If you heard a joke immediately in the days after the event, it might feel crass; if you heard it now, it would feel less crass, it’s fair to say, but still all rather irrelevant. What’s more, there might never be a right time.
***
At this point you might well be thinking:
“Nice, Paddy, interesting, cool, but how does it impact our marketing?”
Good question!
Here’s my answer:
It’s important because some huge events are very difficult to ignore. The big one over the past few years has, of course, been the coronavirus pandemic. This truck (below) caused heads to turn back in 2021 when it slowly drove around the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, before a major football game.
The catch? When you go to the website, here, it says simply this:
By being aware of how humour works after — or during — a major event, you can play it to your advantage. In the case of the Willmore Funeral Home, what some people saw as a sick joke was actually a very clever public safety announcement in disguise.
And their timing? It was spot-on.
Many thanks for reading,
Paddy
pg@studiogilmore.com
+44 7866 538 233
LinkedIn: here
Some readers might take issue at this: it was an attempted assassination rather than an assassination. So was it truly a traumatic event? It could have been far worse certainly, but let’s not forget that one spectator, Corey Comperatore, was shot dead. Also, whatever our views of Trump — personally, I have very little time for him or his views — we can all agree that assassination attempts are, y’know, wrong.
Incidentally, I touched on this in a B&H last year, looking at joke cycles after a news event (here). This is a little different, looking at the amount of time needed before humour can be expressed, accepted and, ideally, appreciated.
Hey, I could write an entire newsletter on mine alone.