Do you want to be funny and use humour to engage your clients better? But are you worried people won’t take you seriously?
You’re right to worry.
In these times, everybody is just one hashtag away from social media disaster. A hashtag that goes viral can damage a career or business quicker than you can say “me too”!
As a content creator, coach or speaker, you’ve probably spent a lot of time and effort building a personal brand and positioning yourself in your marketplace. You don’t want to ruin all that hard work with some stupid joke or silly banter.
Aren’t You Meant to Tell Jokes if you Want to Be Funny?
When it comes to humour, many people believe that “if you want to be funny, just tell jokes”.
However, based on 20 years of Comedy experience, I can safely say that telling jokes is the worst thing you can do if you want to be taken seriously. Telling jokes is the number one way to damage your credibility, put off an audience and put your business at risk.
Jokes are an incredibly high-risk strategy with a 50/50 success rate. Which means there is a 50% failure rate. And when it comes to business, that is WAY TOO HIGH A RISK!
Scattered Humour Leads to Unreliable Results
Using humour is like walking a tightrope. You want a balance of humour to engage your audience, but you don’t want to offend anyone or get caught up in all the chaos of a viral hashtag.
Problems with humour in business usually occur when you use a scattergun approach to humour. It often looks like this:
- Start with the message.
- Add some humour (cos it’s important to add humour!)
- Take it to your market and hope it works.
The thing is, it almost always does not work.
Adding humour just for the sake of adding humour is not sophisticated enough when it comes to business.
Try Being Funny on Purpose
What you want to be doing instead is be funny on purpose.
Being funny on purpose ensures there is a deliberate use of humour to achieve a business-related outcome.
Funny On Purpose follows this process:
- First, think about your market. Who do you want to talk to or address?
- Next, think of the message that you want to share. And remember, it must be relevant to the audience.
- Finally, add humour that supports and aligns with your message that engages your market.
When you follow this process, you hit the bull’s eye. You connect with your market, deliver your message and use humour to do the heavy lifting while still maintaining your brand and position in the market.
3 Steps to Being Funny On Purpose
There are three steps in the Funny On Purpose Formula to use humour effectively:
- Build the brand.
- Find the fun.
- Manage the mood
If you want to find out what these steps entail so you can be funny on purpose, sign up for my Funny On Purpose Humour Short Course today.
