I counted the emails in my inbox on Tuesday. Forty-one brands wrote to tell me these are uncertain times. A mattress company. Two airlines. A shoe subscription I cancelled in 2018. All of them in the same soft gray voice, all of them concluding that we are, in fact, in this together.
Then a frozen sandwich-meat account on Twitter posted something genuinely sharp about how people evaluate information, and I laughed out loud in my kitchen, alone, at Steak-umm.
That gap has been bothering me all week.
Humor is not a tone you apply at the end. Humor is evidence that somebody made a decision. A joke requires a specific view of a specific thing, held firmly enough to risk being wrong in public. A brand that has spent five years carefully avoiding a view will never be funny, no matter how many comedy writers it hires.
A brand cannot be funny and inoffensive at the same time, because every joke is a small act of taking a side.
I have sat in the room where this dies. The first draft is sharp. It names something true, and everyone in the meeting laughs, which is how you know it worked. Then it goes to review. Legal softens the claim. A regional lead worries about a market. Somebody suggests broadening it so it lands for everyone. Six passes later the line is technically still a joke, in the way a photocopy of a photocopy is technically still a face.
Specificity is the fuel. It is also the first thing approvals burn. Old Spice worked because it committed all the way to an absurd premise and never once winked at the camera. Wendy's works because somebody is genuinely allowed to be rude on a Tuesday. Oatly works because the carton copy sounds like one strange person wrote it, which is because one strange person did. None of that survives a consensus process.
Six passes later the line is technically still a joke, in the way a photocopy of a photocopy is technically still a face.
Here is the part that gets lost. The alternative to a joke that might land badly is not safety. It is invisibility, which costs the same money and buys nothing at all. Forty-one identical emails is not forty-one brands playing it safe. It is forty-one brands that were already indistinguishable and finally got caught at it.
Twice a month I used to sing at a bar in Southeast Portland where the host calls everybody baby and the floor holds onto your shoes. I am a bad singer. I am a bad singer who commits, which is the only reason anyone ever claps. The bar has been dark since March and I miss it more than I expected to. Commitment is the whole trick, in karaoke and in comedy, and you cannot fake it in either one.