humour

I’ve been lost in work all day and I’ve just come up for air. In my part of the world the day is as gray and grim as days get so, having lifted my head up from the work I’ve been doing, I am gripped by an indefinable feeling of apprehension. So I made a list of things that give me the willies. It goes like this:

1. My tax assessments (hair standing on end!)
2. Entertainment Tonight
3. Comments on news sites
4. The idea that someone is paid to cut Stephen Harper’s hair that way
5. Toronto
6. Sports radio talk shows on TV
7. Pink toilet paper (It exists! I’ve seen it!)
8. The American pronunciation of the word foyer
9. “Flavoured” beer
10. Buttock eating aliens!

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The best and quickest way to become the butt of someone else’s joke is to have no sense of humour about yourself. That is the lesson of Malvolio, a character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the victim of a wicked joke. He’s so serious about himself, so self-important, he invites the jest.

I bring this up because it’s so easy to get caught up in our passions and obsessions that we often forget to lighten up, as the expression goes.

Humiliation is an excellent salve for this. You wouldn’t want to make a habit of it, but it does help to regain perspective on things. And, let’s be honest, it can be very, very funny. A word of caution though: be sure you’re the first to laugh.

Following years of inadvertently comic personal debacles, I can attest to this. I can also say that I’ve realized there is nothing funnier to me than me.

Besides, in a world of fools the people who have the most fun are the self-aware fools. To quote a Neil Innes song, “How sweet to be an idiot, how sweet …”

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I can take a hint.

Here it was an otherwise lovely, lazy Sunday. The rain was falling softly, the dog was snoozing lightly and I was sipping my coffee slowly as I went to my computer to see what the world had to say about the state of itself. And what did I find?

“Go away Bill.” Is that a nice thing to say to someone? Is such precise directness really necessary?

No explanation. Just, “Go away.” Truly, the milk of human kindness has evaporated.

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A number of unnamed sources are reporting today the death of everything. Pudding, shoes, computers – it’s all gone or will be shortly, all digitized and off into “the cloud.”

“Many of us have been distracted by reports of the death of newspapers, traditional publishing, the music industry – all that stuff,” says one source. “What we’ve failed to notice is what is happening to everything else. For me, the canary in the coal mine is pudding. As goes pudding, so goes the world.”

The reference to pudding alludes to a new app, shortly to be introduced to Facebook, that allows users to give and get pudding – virtual pudding. As the app itself puts it, “All the flavor without the stickiness.” Well, kind of all the flavor. Like everything on Facebook, including friends, you have to imagine it. But if you can, no dietary concerns! No weight gain issues!

Beyond pudding, the migration of everything to digital format and “the cloud” (which use to be called cyberspace until it became tiresome and everyone wanted something more au currant) suggests a multitude of benefits, such as cigarettes that don’t stink and give you cancer.

However, as some experts warn, the catch in all this is an individual’s capacity to imagine. “If you can’t make yourself believe it, how the hell’s it going to work for you?” asks one luddite who, as often happens with major news stories, can’t be named because, as this story suggests, everything is dead or soon will be, including names.

Some skeptics question the authenticity of these reports. However, they quickly change their minds and acquire brows of worry when it’s explained to them that Google bots have gone beyond the web and are now tracking, scanning and digitizing real world objects, including people.

“Hey man, you already exist in the cloud!” they are told. Some have wept, some have said, “Awesome!”

On a related topic, the death of everything also means the end of the quest for a sustainable revenue model for Twitter, as revenue models will be dead. As will Twitter. While Twitter may exist in the cloud, the concept of everything being dead and only nothing left, suggests to some that a) no one will be around to tweet, b) even if there were, there will be nothing to tweet about, and c) Twitter won’t exist.

“It’s a concept so hard to grasp you get headaches trying to figure it out,” says one expert. We can confirm that assessment.

The expert goes on to add, “As always happens, this transition will mean winners and losers. By that I mean I haven’t a clue what it all means so the only thing I can offer you is the standard clichés. But I think I can say this: you think real estate tanked with the credit crisis? Wait’ll you see what happens when ‘everything is dead,’ we’re all in the cloud and no one needs a home anymore!”

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I’m working with a team developing a new social networking tool tentatively called Crotch. We expect to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Given the rapid growth of both, and the deep roots each has developed in a short time, you might think it’s crazy to try to compete in the same space. You would be right except we have a unique value proposition.

An aspect of human connection that is absent from all things web-related is the tactile. Everything is virtual; there is no physical aspect to human interaction online. This is where Crotch steps in.

How it works

In the same way as people currently post, tweet, poke etc., with Crotch you also “post.” However, in order to do so, the initiator must grab his or her crotch as they send. Granted, it’s not a physical connection between people, it’s self-contained, so to speak. But it’s a first in that it requires something physical. Eventually we hope the technology will evolve to a point where there actually is something tactile between two or more people online. But it’s a start.

We’ve managed to incorporate this physical aspect to social networking by incorporating software that “sees” the user and can detect whether he or she makes contact between the legs. It simply isn’t possible to send and not make a tactile connection with the nether regions. The software reads (”sees”) what you do.

Known issues

We’re so far advanced in the development of Crotch that our biggest obstacle right now is linguistic. We’ve settled on Crotch as a name for the social network, but what do we call the “send” aspect? Do you “crotch” another user? Does a user get “crotched?” It strikes me that the name gets ugly when you start turning it into a verb with a variety of tenses.

We’ve considered one possibility: pubed. “I’m pubing him,” or “She just pubed me.” The problem here, of course, is laser hair removal. The term may confuse some users.

Many of the other possibilities we’ve tossed around were eliminated not so much on their sound merits (many rolled off the tongue) but by the constraints of gender. I recall one in particular that worked really well but, unfortunately, was too much like “tweet” (a mere vowel away) and was too gender specific a term.

Still, these language issues are minor and should be overcome in short order.

Coming soon

Crotch will also have a mobile aspect so people will be able to use it on their iPhone, or just about any cell for that matter. Our expectation is that it will be launched within six months and, one year from now, given the quick growth of successful social networks, we envision a world where people everywhere – in their cars, on the streets, in office cubicles – will be clutching their groins because they’ll all be using their Crotch!

(Btw, a user’s account will be known as MyCrotch.)

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One of the mistakes that often comes up in writing, and especially problematic in business/commercial writing such as ad copy, is the attempt to be funny. Humour works, and works like gangbusters, when it hits the mark. But when it doesn’t the results can be disastrous. So here are a few reasons why humour is best avoided:

- We aren’t as funny as we think.

- What we think is funny and what someone else finds funny can vary – greatly.

- We may offend people, and that’s fine if it’s our intent or if we simply don’t care. But from a long term perspective (such as our reputation) it is not usually a good idea.

- If we do use humour, set what we’ve written aside for at least a day, then read it over. Is it still funny? More often than not, the answer will be no. But if we still think it’s funny, try running it by a few people. Do they think it’s funny? Do they even get it?

- A great deal of humour depends on context. Can we control or create the context? If not, our humour is likely to fall flat. (By context, I mean the set up. Punchlines are dependent on the set up. The set up creates the context. Humour isn’t always a joke but whatever kind of “funny” it is, the context, or set up, is what makes it funny.)

I’ve worked with writers in the past who have written what they thought was howlingly funny material only to find that what they had really done was annoy, disappoint or even offend a client or customer. And yes, I have been guilty of thinking I was Groucho Marx when in fact I was Richard Nixon.

It’s great to be funny. Unfortunately, it’s also very hard and surprisingly rare.

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I bought a book the other day — The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry. It’s a book about writing poetry. No, really.

Now, I think I know enough about language and particularly English that I don’t need a book about how to write a poem. So why pick this up? The answer is simple and it comes in two parts.

The first part is that Mr. Fry is quite English in the way he writes and he’s a particular kind of Englishman in the way he writes. He’s very humourous and very dry, which always appeals to me, and he has very wide range of words he draws upon. In other words, he writes well and he’s funny (not to mention informative).

The second reason is because I like writing poetry though I’ve not done it for a very long time. However, one year I wrote over 500 poems! Granted, the vast majority were crap. In fact, I recall only two that I actually liked (and one was bad but I liked what it aspired to be).

So, one reason for getting the book was to see if, while being amused by Mr. Fry’s way of writing, I might not also be inspired to start writing poems again.

There is one very great risk, however. I discovered back in my poetry writing days that, after a certain point, my free verse style fell away and I got hooked on rhyme. I nearly drove myself mad with rhyming things — it was not something I wanted to do but was something I was compelled to do. I would find myself drying dishes, putting cutlery away, and saying things like, “And now I put away this knife – or shall I, rather, take a life?”

It took years of therapy to get over that. It was the second time it had happened. Years ago, at college, a friend and I went through a hudibrastic couplet phase — those are couplets that rhyme but don’t really (like many popular songs do). (”I fell in love in springtime/on the Mason-Dixon line.“)

Anyway, I do hope this doesn’t lead to bad things. To be honest, I haven’t started reading the book yet. I may never get around to it. I may be too frightened to start. But should you start seeing posts that resemble what follows, at least you’ll know why:

I think that I may never see
A blog rhyme quite like poetry
But that‘s okay, most of the time
Poetry (when good) does not rhyme.

Yet, why not rhyme a word or three
And pass it off as poetry?
(Oh my, I rhymed that once before,
in verse the first, lines three and four.)

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