Ryan MacMillan

On Tuesday evening, my friend James told me a joke that runs like this:

An Israeli recently arrives at London’s Heathrow airport. As he fills out a form, the customs officer asks him: “Occupation?”

The Israeli promptly replies: “No, just visiting!”

For various reasons (partly because it smells slightly of propaganda, partly because I believe jokes are an accurate barometer of public opinion), I was interested to see where this joke came from.

Tracking the joke
A Google search on the punchline shows (15 September) around 230 direct quotations of the joke, and reveals one possible source as AFP report from August 30th (the story also mentions Beirut’s Johnnie Walker poster.) It looks as though there might be something here to support my propaganda theory, but that’s not what this post is about.

Charting the key elements of the punchline (israeli, “just visiting”) on Technorati shows a the story taking off the day after the AFP release, then tailing off -

(and here’s a nifty dynamic widget from Technorati that tracks posts that contain Israeli "just Visiting" per day for the last 30 days.)

Trollope & Howell

Now this is of interest to me. I recently came across this apposite passage in Trollope:

In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument [...] We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument…

But it’s also interesting in light of a conversation with our friend Katy Howell yesterday evening about the nature of viral channels. We’ve been looking into the subject with increasing interest recently; the work I’ve been doing on our YouTube project is a part of this. But really, at this stage, it’s more an attempt to create some kind of conceptual model that allows us to think usefully about viral, buzz, and word-of-mouth.

Communications Models
One of the models we’ve picked up is David Berlo’s SMCR model - it’s fairly straightforward, and allows us to compare different kinds of communications activity.

The table below shows some of our very rough attempts to classify a few types of marketing communication (it needs a great deal more work):

The first thing we noticed was that any clear definition of “viral advertising” required us to place the audience/receiver/public in two (possibly conflicting) simultaneous roles. This neatly demonstrates one of the things that we’ve been worried about when discussing viral advertising:- a tendency to conflate “Word of Mouth” and “Viral”.

Viral communication replication requires the recipient to relay a message basically unchanged. They are required to add little or none of themselves to the message. This is chain letters we’re talking about; not chinese whispers. For a gene, meme, or message to replicate successfully, we want little or no noise/mutation to enter the system.

Word of mouth channels, on the other hand rely on exactly that “personalisation” of the message that viral channels preclude: hence the massively increased effectiveness of WOM recommendations over other channels.

Howell at the Meme

Back to the conversation with Katy Howell. I was arguing this point: our suspicions that viral channels must always be less effective than other channels; that the advantage of viral channels rests solely in the amplification of reach.

I added to these something to the effect that - in order to ensure the accurate transmission of a message, advertisers are forced to prefer hermetically-sealed file formats: accounting for the predominance of flash games, movies, images, and .pps files.

Katy disagreed with my assessment, and brought up the example of jokes as a counterargument. Jokes, she pointed out, are traded as social capital.

Branded Jokes

Now, it says nothing new to point out that humour is a political tool. Trollope was being disingenuous when he suggested there was a trend towards ridicule.

But it is interesting to notice that jokes are (quite often) formulaic shells one can use to deliver one’s message.

For example, the joke about the Israeli at Heathrow is (I believe) adapted from an older one I heard about a German travelling in Poland (”Occupation? No, just a short visit.”) Another joke has the useful punchline “Oh - that’s God. He just thinks he’s (insert name of self-important person or group of people here).”

Many of the jokes in the AFP release have been around for a while, and were just adapted for the story (I’ve found alternative sources for at least three with almost no effort.)

Jokes are infinitely adaptable. They are memorable. They reinforce attitudes. They are formulaic enough that they rarely change. And they spread rapidly at an unconscious viral level.

If I were a propagandist, I’d consider jokes part of my armoury. Is there room to use them in brand communications?