I'm not a funny person, but I enjoy funny people and their charm.
As a tool of persuasion
I was at a No. 10 reception at which Boris Johnson gave an amazing speech, which seemed so off the cuff and fantastic. Slightly bumbling, as ever, of course.
“Not”, he said, “since the Aztec Empire: the Mazatecs, the Mixtecs, the Chinantecs, the Toltecs, the Ixcatecs, and so on — has one nation — BRITAIN! — known so much tech. EdTech, MedTech, FinTech, RegTech, HealthTech, PropTech… “ and so he went on.
It was a funny line, extremely well delivered, and very well-received. And yet the CEO of (at the time) one of the UK’s three biggest startups stood next to me and groaned. This was, apparently, the fourth time he’d heard Boris tell this exact joke in the last month. What seemed so original was in fact a contrived line he’d worked up, tested out, and deployed countless times already. And this poor CEO was spending far too much of his time schmoozing lobbyists to tolerate it any more.
Selling anything to anyone — whether you’re a startup founder raising venture capital, a politician winning over an audience, or a car salesman palming off an old motor — is a matter of developing a message, testing it, taking in the response, and refining it over time. In military jargon, it’s an OODA loop (observe-orient-decide-act), wherein observing is knowing your audience, orienting is picking your message, deciding is choosing your moment, and acting is execution. This is all great.
Boris’ strategy is unique, though, in that he’s winning people over (or trying) with a special kind of comic charm. His delivery is designed to seem organic every time. He’s explicitly trying to come across less like a salesperson (with a persuasive set of reasons as to why you should do anything), and more like a comedian (who recognizes every day truths and amusing things, and tees them up in a way that the individual appreciates for themselves). Delivery then is everything. And of course, it doesn’t work in a repeat context. The same joke told over and over to the same audience, however funny to begin with, isn’t funny on its fifth attempt. In fact, if crafted to appear spontaneous the first time, it may come across as calculated as well as tired if one is uncareful.