Lately I’ve been watching stand up comedy and unuseless reality show such as Impractical Jokers and Billy on the Street while working. While watching I couldn’t stop admiring how they never ran out of ideas.
There’s no argument that to create a good humor you need to be smart and insane. Humor in a way, is the same like design. It needs to communicate well to the audience. But also, weird enough and beyond the audience imagination, to make the joke stick in their head longer. I remembered a joke my teacher told me 12 years ago, and that joke is remembered more than the actual lesson.
A book I read by Joshua Foer, called Moonwalking with Einstein, is a book about a journey of the author on remembering everything. One of the tips that he learned is that we need to associate the thing we want to remember with an association that is weird and unrealistic. For example dancing wine bottles with red dress when you have to buy red wine while shopping. In a way, we have to create the joke, or the unimaginable in our head to make the actual event or thing stick in our head. This is why I think we should implement jokes on graphic design work if needed.
There are some examples of humor on graphic and advertising works that I admire. Kesselskramer is an advertising agency in the Netherlands that worked with humor most of their work. My favorite piece is their work for Hans Brinker Budget Hostel. The work is hilarious, ironic, and out of the box that I kept telling the jokes to my fellows. The ads work! The low budget hostel is now famous, thanks to them.
Humor can turn something boring to a total entertainment without necessarily taking out the real context. It’s a skill that could be develop if we take the irony, turned reality up side down, and really pay attention into detail of everyday life. I guess this is the skill all graphic designer should have atleast a little.
