The late American comedian Mitch Hedburg, while not forgotten, is certainly not as celebrated as he ought to be. He was a stand-up with a surreal, meandering style, a scatter-shot approach and a not-surprisingly stoned delivery. By most accounts, he used drugs to overcome his crippling stage fright. We don’t know if they helped with the stage fright, but we do know that they are what ended his life at just 37.
He talked about ordinary, everyday stuff, with a clear eye for little details that other people don’t question or even notice. These details passed though his consciousness in a way other people don’t experience – but totally understand when they’re put back to them.
“Sometimes, the hotels I stay in’ll have a minibar,” goes one randomly selected observation on his album Strategic Locations. So far so ordinary. But wait. “A minibar is a machine that makes everything expensive.”
Transcribing them doesn’t do them justice. You need to hear it in his goofy drawl. But it’s still great. Here’s another one. “One time a guy handed me a picture of him, saying, ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ But every picture is of you when you were younger.”
And, actually, that is how pretty much all stand-up comedians work. They find that truth – large or small – and put a subtle spin on it. That nudge causes you to see it as if for the first time and yet feel a pleasurable ripple of recognition too.
Hedburg again: “This shirt I’m wearing is dry clean only. Which means it’s… dirty.” It’s funny, but it’s not a joke. How many of us are dry cleaning the clothes that need dry cleaning? Not me. Someone must be, but I’m not.
The observations of most comedians, like those I’ve quoted above are truths. They’re funny because they’re intuitive. They demonstrate self-awareness and honesty. Insights get to the heart of something you’d never really thought about before but know instinctively to be right. They touch a nerve. They might even make you shed a tear. Whether it’s a tear of laughter or a tear of sadness depends on the insight. (Insights, of course, aren’t always funny.)
If you work in advertising, you don’t need to know about markets, sales targets, business objectives and strategies as much as you need to know about people. And how do you make a brand mean something to people? You connect a product or a service to a relevant insight.
If you have a particularly incisive planner on a project that can crack that killer insight, the creative team barely have to look up from their flat whites to put together the campaign. Insights are what the business of advertising is all about. It doesn’t matter what channels you are using.
A hundred years ago, Harry McCann was talking about great work being built upon the ‘truth well told.’ David Ogilvy said that advertisers should “Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating.”
Because the truth in itself isn’t fascinating. A lot of things are true. As a creative director I once worked for said to me, “Sure the sky is blue, but who gives a f*ck?”