Explaining funny

This is one of the most famous comedy bits of all time:

But why is it funny? The disconnect between experiencing it and explaining it represents one of the challenges of teaching. It’s also at the heart of leadership, marketing and culture.

Design, good taste, genre, communication style–these are all human endeavors that inform our days, but most of the time, we’re at a loss to explain them.

Abbott and Costello are avatars, approachable and relatable to their audience. You can see yourself as one or the other, depending on the moment. They’ve plotted an intricate dialogue, one that builds on itself, gaining traction and increasing tension as it goes. And as each expresses their frustration with the situation (and to a degree, with each other), it’s easy to put ourselves in their shoes.

We’ve never been in this exact situation, but we’ve all experienced a moment like this.

Most of us are in on the joke as we watch it. We know it’s a joke, and we understand early on the nature of the wordplay. So much so that the sketch itself becomes an icon, one that others are based on, sometimes with great fidelity:

Funny even before the reign of U2. So iconic that it’s now a three-word shorthand.

We can have the same discussion about your logo. Or why your book cover is less than it could be.

When someone is designing a bridge, we don’t have to wonder if the engineer “gets it.” The metrics are obvious and easily measured. We have precise words and numbers that are external to our own experience and the zeitgeist, and whether a person or a machine does the calculations, it works or it doesn’t.

But much of the rest of the human experience is often too layered and nuanced to be reduced to a simple formula. We need to notice enough and engage enough to get it. That’s what Heinlein was talking about when he coined the 60s term grok.

When a municipality sets aside the resources to build a ‘signature’ bridge, their own Golden Gate, there’s often a conflict. Not just disagreement about the need for something more than the utility of moving across the river, but also understanding what beautiful and important even looks like. Some people don’t get it.

Saying “that’s not funny,” or “I think it’s ugly,” is easy. The difficult work is acknowledging that someone else might disagree.

Human emotions require a viewer, not just a creator. The funny, the beauty, the elegance: they happen for someone, in their experience.

“That’s not beautiful,” is not the same as, “I don’t think that’s beautiful.”

I don’t have to explain a joke or a sculpture or a logo. But I do have to know enough to imagine that someone else is going to get it. We can choose to care enough to figure out why someone gets something we don’t, and imagine what it might take to create something human enough that others will care about it.

There’s no algorithm, which is part of the point.