What happened to funny?

"In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the belly laugh, and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure knows all about a belly laugh.  The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung... The reader can get a fair enough idea of the current state of screen comedy by asking himself how long it has been since he has had that treatment." 
           - James Agee, Life Magazine, September 3 1949
             quoted by A.O. Scott in the NY Times Magazine, November 12 2006

Although that was written over 50 years ago and is about comedy in film, it strikes me that it could just as easily be written about advertising today. When was the last time you had a big, body-wrenching laugh from an ad? 

I feel like advertising hasn't been very funny recently.  Which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, since there are lots of other emotions we can and do use to communicate.  It's just that so much of advertising tries to be funny, which makes it painful how rarely we achieve it.  Most humour in advertising seems to be stuck on bad puns and lame little one-liners. We go for vaguely amused smiles, rather than belly laughs.  Which is fine if success is based on testing for things such as "likeability."  But in an era of YouTube, Borat and Jackass, the bits that are most likely to make an impact and get passed around and played with are those that get the "ohmygodyouhavetoseethis" reaction, rather than just being likeable.  So it seems to me like we need to rethink how we approach humour.  If you're going to be funny, be balls-out funny.

So I want to bring back the boffo.  I'm putting together a list of the funniest recent advertising, and hopefully it'll inspire us to do better.  Here's my favourite from the past year.  I've seen it a hundred times and I still laugh every time I see it. 

So what else belongs on the list?

Comments

[Ari]

Very funny - Here is one of my favourites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRqd8opKxA0