Chad Maxwell breaks down what makes his social media content work: relatability to everyday life, unexpected twists on familiar premises, and benign violation humor, a technique that adds a darker or surprising edge to harmless situations to create memorable laughs.
If there were 3 things that you could say your social media does that makes people really engaged and interested, what would they be?
Okay, this is a really tough question. I do like humor that is relatable, so it's probably relatability could probably be one of those key points. But I also like taking it in a direction that's unexpected and unusual. So usually I'll take a very relatable thing, um, and then twist it in a way, um, uh, to make it unexpected. Like, there's a, there's a term my friend, my, my, my, my, uh, comedian friend told me about that he said that I— that he told me I do really well, which is the benign violation. Which is taking something that should be very benign and then twisting it in a way that does kind of make it slightly darker, which makes it funny.
