Innovation by SIT

Consider the following joke: 
“My wife just ran off with my best friend.  Boy, do I miss him.”

Now, look at the following ad for Pedigree Dog Care products (Advertising agency: TBWA\Paris, France, Creative director: Erik Vervroegen)
“Beware of the Dog. He’s got terrible diarrhoea”

Both are funny. Now, what’s interesting is to ask, why?

For one, both use some kind of “twist” to create the punch – whether that’s a wry smile or a vocal laugh.

But what is a “twist” and how do you create it? As a mechanism, the twist works by messing with what we were expecting to happen. 

To understand the structure of a “twist” I consulted the “College of Comedy” for some assistance.  I learned that many jokes have three basic parts: The first part “sets up” a basic assumption in the audience’s mind, the second part reinforces this assumption, leading up to the “punch” in which this assumption is suddenly flipped on its head.  Interestingly, there’s a structure to jokes.  Miss one part of the joke, and well, you become the joke.

Let’s go back to the Pedigree “Beware the Dog” ad, and try and understand its structure using the SIT framework of Thema and Rhema.  In a nutshell, Thema refers to the part of a communication that “we already know” (our underlying assumption), and Rhema to the part that’ “is new to us”.  In this ad, I suggest the “punch” comes by making a slight change to the Thema.  “We all know that dog signs warn us of violent dogs” (That’s the Thema here).  By changing “violent” to “dog with diarrhoea” we cleverly upset the Thema, and in so doing, have created something that takes us by surprise.

So, like many good jokes, many “creative” ads work by subverting our expectations of what we think should happen. 

In many ways, comedians and creatives are both expert at toying with our expectations, and teasing our assumptions. Their originality notwithstanding, what’s interesting is that, consciously or not, they seem to use these structures or formulas repeatedly – because they work. What’s really amazing is that we the audience are oblivious to these structures, and fall for their effects, when well executed, most of the time.

I’ll end this post with an amazing campaign for the Buenos Aires Film Festival by La Comunidad featuring mustachioed men and clowns in a carpark.  Apart from the absurd genius of the scenarios, notice the underlying structure of the stepped approach to building up to the twist.  Enjoy.  

This is the second in a series of posts called “Creativity Uncovered: the amazing patterns behind amazing creative” in which I try and look for the structures underlying great ideas and executions.