Using Humor in Your Marketing With Frank Kern (2 of 2)

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In this episode, we're completing part 2 of using humor in marketing with Frank Kern. Now, in the last episode, we discussed both Dan Kennedy and Frank Kern's processes for using humor and how they work that in and when they don't. In this second part, Dan Kennedy and Frank Kern are going to close the conversation with not only how to use humor, the shortcuts for humor, but also a list of ways that you should be avoiding humor inside of your marketing. Let's listen in.

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So, uh, so on your list of stuff that you would not touch, uh, or is there a list of anything that you would—

well, first of all, I'm not as nice about it as Frank just described. I mean, I will use— I will use confrontational humor, and I will pretty consciously and intentionally know that I am going to make somebody unhappy, um, and irritate and annoy and offend somebody in order to really resonate with somebody else. Um, so our approach there probably is a little different. My list would be situational, when the opportunity to be situational presented itself. But generally speaking, no. You know, the classic 101 sort of Toastmaster-ish advice given anybody when they start speaking is, you know, don't talk about sex, politics, or religion. And it seems to me the only thing left then on the list that is a meaningful part of the day-to-day human experience is food. So you've ruled out 3 out of 4 aspects of life that you can't talk about. So I never paid any attention to that. I do think you can, you can, and in Some sales environments you can stick to just completely safe and benign humor, although again, you can make that attempt and still wind up with somebody bitterly offended. I did. I've told this before, but I had this throwaway line about you could tell it was a recession because all the Jehovah's Witnesses and Avon ladies were carpooling. Which I used for 10 years in the Peter Law events. And I kept waiting for the complaints from the Jehovah's Witnesses, which never came. We finally did get a really violent, aggravated, angry complaint from an Avon sales manager. And so you, you really, you can bend over backwards trying to have a safe list and you'll still find it's not safe, you know, with somebody. I wouldn't do anything that I thought was racist, so I agree with Frank there, although again, it's subjective. I wouldn't do like a Rickles act, but I will do a little bit of Rickles, like playing around with an audience. Live with members of an audience. And like Frank says, you can kind of test the pulse then, and you can tell who's okay with it and who isn't okay with it. And if you're sort of skilled, you can spot them pretty easily, who you should play with and who you shouldn't play with. But in print, in media, in sales material of my own, and stuff I've done for clients. I'll do politics, I'll do religious stuff, I'll do off-color depending upon the situation in the audience, the voice of the person that it's supposed to be in. You know, some people are expected to be coarser than others and their audience is more receptive of it.. But by and large, no, I don't think there's anything on the list. And the converse of that is, and I think this is true probably of most writers, in a sense it's dangerous to be around any of us because we'll use just about anything if we think it will work. So from personal life, from conversation, from eavesdropped conversation, from some experience somebody relates to us. I think all writers are scavengers, you know, are great users and pretty shameless in what we'll reveal about ourselves or about others in order to be effective in general and in order to get a laugh specific to the use of humor.

What about, what about, uh, what is actually gonna leap into a question I have later, but I'm gonna ask it now. What about, um, sort of what's current news? I mean, if you look at Letterman, Conan O'Brien, uh, Leno, their opening monologue, it's gotta be more than 50% making fun of current news. Matter of fact, I I think I heard recently that more people are now watching one of the opening monologues for their news than they are actually watching the news right now.

How valuable—

well, first of all, I know Dan, you use it. Frank, are you using current news in sort of your pattern interrupt humor? And is that a real good shortcut for most people?

—when you're looking for something. I think it's an excellent shortcut. And an example that's coming to mind was when the news of the recession first broke. Right? I mean, it seemed like it was like one day everything was cool, and then the next day everyone said, holy shit, we're dead. You know what I mean? So I released a video, which the intent of the video was to sell something. And I released a video that was both educational but really made fun of that, because the media was acting as if the money had all just gone away. Or something. So, you know, my joke there was, I'm sure you've heard all the idiots, you know, I'm sure you've heard all the $30 grand a year talking heads on your local news tell you how all the money's gone away, but if you listen to these idiots, you're going to make what these idiots make. I mean, think about this logically. It's not like the money fairy came and took it all away, or it's not like bin Laden came and hid all the money in his underground bunker. Then I went on to make the point that the money is transferred from Group A, people like them, quote unquote, to Group B, people like us, and drew that correlation and made the sale. So That type of environment is— A, the answer to your question is yes. I think it is a great idea to use the news. And B, to clarify my earlier statements about not making fun of people, I think it is okay and fun to make fun of an ambiguous group of them such as "the media." What I really meant was I don't want to make fun of an individual person to the point where it would harm them.

Yeah, and I got you. And I just said I am occasionally willing to throw somebody under the bus.

But that's because you're mean old dad.

Um, look, the news is, um, first of all, it gets harder and harder to do satire because of the goofiness of the actual news. But yeah, it's a— and, and if you're doing media, if you're not doing anything immediate, then, you know, it's got to be something that's going to have some life beyond today or tomorrow. So like, you know, Tom DeLay on Dancing with the Stars has pretty limited shelf life, but Somalia pirates, that had shelf life. And so you could still do something with that today, and it really became a news story a year ago.. So, you know, you got to think about how you're going to use something from the news, where you're going to use it, and how much shelf life it has, and how widespread the knowledge of it in your market is. And it is dangerous to overestimate that. You know, a big difference between Leno say the last 10 years on The Tonight Show, and maybe all of his years, but— and Carson, and Leno explained this himself in interviews— is he has to put everything in a frame of reference in the monologue, assuming that nobody knows anything. And Carson did not. If you go back and look at a Carson monologue, if he made fun of If he talked about Henry Kissinger, he didn't explain to you who the hell Henry Kissinger was. Now, if Leno talks about somebody, almost without exception, he's going to put them in a frame of reference for you, not assuming that everybody knows who Joe Biden is. And he's right, by the way, not wrong. And so, you know, we, we all have to remember that, like, all of the cable news programs added together have a viewership of, oh, 8 million, give or take, um, in a week, because it's the same people every night. And American Idol starts at 20 million and in its peak episodes hits 70 million. So what people know and are paying attention to You know, humor can't work if they don't know the basis of it. And that varies by market and by age demographic and by what their interests are. So, you know, if you were writing to doctors right now, chiropractors, dentists, MDs, whatever, they are much more dialed in to everything that's going on with proposed healthcare reform than rank-and-file folks are. Rank-and-file folks have a vague and general idea, but if you were gonna pick at specifics, you wouldn't do that with a big general audience. But the news, you know, hands you things again that you don't have to be very funny to use and to work into copy and into advertising, because every day they hand you something that is inherently funny. I mean, Somalia pirates and pirates in today's day and age, see, that's funny in and of itself. I mean, yes, the comedians at night had a field day, but you don't have to be real good to get something out of that to use in a sales letter that people will find funny because the situation itself is funny.

Well, listen, so I'm going to go back and disagree with something that Frank said earlier on, which is the fact that he said, you know, if you're not funny, don't use humor. And I think that even if you're not funny, you can find ways to use it.

Yeah, you have to find things you can do.

The first thing you can do is make fun of yourself for not being funny. Yes. You know, and I've actually told this story from stage, so if you're an investment maker who's horribly boring, you could actually— Your position could be, now listen, I don't want you to sue me for the possible coma you may go in as I'm about to give you this financial advice. The last person that came in here went into a coma and they're still trying to revive them. But if you have your smelling salts ready and you can manage to take enough amphetamines to keep you awake during this, I just might give you some tips that'll help you triple your net worth over the next 8 months or something like that. That would be a good sort of way to do that.

Yeah. And now actually, if that was being done in an office and the guy genuinely was really, really incapable of being funny, even that would be difficult for him, but you could help him a lot with props. Yeah. So if, as he said that, he brought over, you know, the little oxygen tank and the oxygen mask and the defib, now his delivery wouldn't matter as much, and it would still— and it would now get big laughs.

Listen, all three of us speak from the stage, and I know, Dan, you and I have both taught others how to speak from the stage. I don't know, Frank, if you've ever entered that genre of education or not.

I don't know.

But at what point when you speak from the stage are you moving from this is me to I'm really more of an actor on the stage. Is that conscious?

Well, for some people it is far more conscious than others. I think that your stage persona and the performance that you give deliver up there is for most people more purposed and conscious than is what they do offstage. But I don't think you want to strive for a complete personality transformation. Because as Frank said earlier, it starts to feel forced and fake. And maybe the lack of authenticity will hurt you more than anything else that you do up there. So the humorous story from personal experience, for example, is better material than is the the joke taken from the joke book because it's less natural to tell the joke than it is the personal story. I think the stage diminishes a little bit, so you know, you essentially are just exaggerating yourself, but to a great degree, the best— what works the best for most people is the same as works when writing in print. And that is, there's a term for it, Frank described it earlier, it is presumed longstanding relationship. And that is that you talk to the audience, you relate to the audience as if you guys are old friends and you know each other well. And everybody's kind of in on the gag and everybody's there to have a good time. And in environments where that's not possible, like you're really time limit restricted, so like it's Peter Lowe events where it's not possible, time just doesn't allow you to slow down and kind of create that kind of rapport, then a much higher skill level is required in order to get results there.. But in most environments most people would work in to promote their business, whether a local business or a national business, to promote themselves, they have the opportunity to just be themselves pumped up a little, not really to create a whole new style and a whole new person to be up there.

I'm going to open up for questions shortly, but I have one or two more quick questions to ask you guys, or actually I would rather say I have one or two more questions to ask you guys that I'd like you to be quick on your answers. But before I do that, Frank, one of the things that occurred to me as I was listening to Dan talk about adding a soundtrack, a laughter soundtrack on a comedy show on television, It occurred to me that that could be kind of interesting to add soundtracks to, like, online videos. Have you ever done anything like that? Not only exclusively laugh soundtracks, but any kind of soundtrack on any of the videos you've ever done?

For me, yeah. Oh, like it's for Dan. Sorry. Yeah, definitely. No, that was for— Oh, that was for Dan? Oh, yeah.

Oh, no, that wasn't for Dan. Okay, okay. You actually—

I missed it for a second, but go ahead. Dan doesn't know about these computer, this internet thing yet. This internet fad all the kids are talking about.

So how have you used soundtracks on video?

Let's try that approach. I use music on there. My video guy uses music on there all the time. You know, set the mood and stuff. But I don't put gag noises in or anything. But we probably will, but it'll be like we have an upcoming show that we just filmed some of yesterday, and we'll film some tomorrow that involves me in a helicopter, like an actual helicopter. And we might have to add in some helicopter rotor noises just to make it sound better on the ground. But I don't know. I would hesitate to use the canned laugh thing, because then it would start to look like a TV show. And it would look like a TV show that has a little value to them. So I want my stuff to feel like it's exclusive and cool and way beyond anything else. But music, definitely. To set the mood and not just—

I will tell you, when you see an infomercial with a live audience, oftentimes their applause or their laughter, their reactions are double-tracked so that you actually are hearing more than what actually happened on the TV show, on the infomercial.

Yeah, and we had a conversation, I think it was the Platinum meeting ago, when Steven Snyder was talking about how he filmed, I think it was an infomercial, or maybe it wasn't, maybe it was one of the seminars. A webinar, yeah. And we talked about the fact that he did it before a live audience and the different, you know, how to maximize that more so than it was even being maximized at that time. So yeah, I think it's That's a great application there. Here's my question for both of you. We talked about using the news as one of the shortcuts to adding humor to your marketing. What would each of you say is maybe one or two other shortcuts? Because there's no question people love shortcuts. So what would be on your shortcut list?

My mind was immediately self-deprecation and sarcasm. That's like the total shortcut. So if I have a video and I don't really think it's the best produced thing, I might say, "I just don't want you guys to freak out, but this is probably going to be the best, most incredibly produced video you've ever seen. And don't hold it against me if this is all you want to do for the rest of your life is watch this video. So without further ado, here it is." And then it could end up being not professionally produced or good at all, but that sort of self-depreciating sarcasm sort of sets the tone and overcomes any barriers—

you know. Well, I— look, I have swipe files for this, just as you would have swipe files for other aspects of advertising and marketing. So, I mean, in search of the humorous story or the humorous idea that you're going to work into copy, I mean, I'll go hunt for it. And so there's accumulated swipe files by topic because often you can recycle, you know, material, simply changing out names, places, dates, times. The New Yorker cartoons are sorted by topic. And essentially a cartoon is, you know, a story summarized. So that can give you a jumping off point. I do think that, and again, probably more by inclination than training, I think Frank thinks funny. Most pros, comedy pros, condition themselves to think funny and think funny to the point that they have to be careful, you know, not to blurt things out at inappropriate times that are offensive to people. Joan Rivers has said, for example, that, you know, the day after 9/11 in New York, and she lives in New York, she's walking down the street thinking to herself, how long it will be before you can do comedy about this, and when you can, what's the comedy? Now, people who are serious students of humor or who are into humor, that's how they think. And you really wouldn't want to voice that, certainly not in 2001. You know, it's been said that the thing that has— that time has never separated the tragedy enough from itself to be humorous about is the JFK assassination. It's one of the few historical events that hardly anybody tries to do any comedy about. But generally speaking, you can rely on swipe files and references for this just as you would for headlines or grabbers or anything else. And I think that you ought to have a swipe file library for it if you're looking for shortcuts. The biggest shortcut though of all is conditioned thinking about it so that it comes to you now naturally, organically out of your head. Your subconscious rather than having to be forced. And that's, you know, read, pay attention to comedy, listen to great comedians, not bad ones but good ones, and you begin to build up your sort of your subconscious swipe files.

Kind of like if you listen to the Rolling Stones all the time, you'll, and then you pick up a guitar, you'll probably end up playing like the Rolling Stones. Based on exposure. I agree, by the way. I think it's a good excuse to watch really funny dumb stuff all the time. Yeah. I mean, I would love to watch Oprah with you, but I'm working, and as you can see, we have to watch Tommy Boy again.

Well, actually, when Dan watches Oprah, he's watching probably 4 shows at once and writing a sales letter simultaneously.

Yeah, but to me, Oprah is comedy.

The, I think we're done.

Tommy Boy, by the way, was not.

I think we're finished our shortcut question. So, and we almost answered our last question, my last question, but I'll just, I'll ask it a little differently. So my last question was about resources. If I want to become more of a student of humor, where's some resources? One resource I'll just sort of give out right now is— and I don't even have a link or URL to give anybody, but if people are not using Mike Capuzzi's Copy Doodles, he has a whole now online— he has a whole cartoons on there that you can go and grab, and we're now using them a lot at Glaser Kennedy to add a little bit of humor into your marketing. Dan, I know you've all— you've talked You've talked about in the past some books that you've found very helpful. Anything that comes to mind that you would recommend to people?

Well, there's the reference category. So like in copywriting, think reference books like your dictionary, your thesaurus, your Words That Sell thesaurus, those kind of books. There's that in comedy as well. So you know, there's the Milton Berle Joke File. There's, uh, Esar's Comic Dictionary, which has every structure of a— every different way you can structure a humorous story or a joke now organized. Then there's real swipe file stuff of people who rely more on humorous stories than jokes, because we are more likely to use the humorous story than we are the outright joke. And not that you would ever again steal their stuff outright,, but much of it will either remind you of something personal of your own that you can twist around and use. So contemporaries— most comedians have their acts kind of turned into books. So like if you get Ron White's book, you really have most of the stories from Ron White's act in writing. If you get Woody Allen's Without Feathers, you really have Woody Allen's old stand-up acts in writing. Um, and, and although I'm not as current on it as I would like to be, ultimately a lot of those books I rip them up and put the pages into files by category. So I have a bunch of stories about this or about that or about this other thing. And there's a plethora, you know, of that material out there. Um, and, and there's also, of course, a ton of DVDs. I mean You know, you could do worse for yourself than watching some really good comedy DVD rather than the current episode of American Idol.

Frank, any quick resource or just listen to your stuff all the time? Well, the last thing I would advise anyone to do is to listen to my stuff for really any reason. The Family Guy is great because they use current events a lot as humor, and then it's also a great study on how to use random obscure cultural references references that everyone knows about but has forgotten about. So if you watch Family Guy, Peter Griffin always has these cutaway setups where he will say something like, "This is almost as bad as the way Laura Ingalls' dress ruffled in the wind on Little House on the Prairie." And it is like this completely obscure pop culture reference that everyone knows but is not front of mind, but then they make it funny. So it is a great way to learn how to do that is Family Guy. And then Seinfeld. So if you look at stuff pretty much everybody thought was funny. And then you watch a lot of it and you try to dissect what was funny about it. Like with Seinfeld, so much is funny with that is not only the visual gags, but the buildup of tension and the impending plot gone awry, and the way that whole thing is always set up there. It's a great reference on ways to just interject humor. And I couldn't really agree more with Dan's overall strategy just watch and expose yourself to stuff that is funny all the time. It's good for you anyway, I think, and it gives you, it gives you just sort of that subconscious, turns that on, you know, in your subconscious.

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