comedy and strategy are fundamentally the same artistic process.

the basic formula for a joke is to establish a premise and then undercut the expectations of that premise with some sort of non-sequitur. this requires a few things.

first, you need to be able to establish subject matter context. this requires 1) subject-matter knowledge, and 2) an understanding of your audience’s understanding of this subject matter. this requires both semantic intelligence and also reasonable ToM (theory of mind) skills. you need to know (enough) about what you’re talking about, and you need to have an understanding of how much other people know about that topic. this is how you establish a context that can draw people in because they’re able to understand what you’re talking about. simple, really.

so you’ve established a good context. nice. now subvert the expectations of that context.

this can be done in a variety of ways; infinite, really. and you can add as many layers of complex storytelling over the top of this equation as you want; infinite, really. just remember Chekhov’s advice about the gun and yadda yadda. understanding your audience’s ToM is crucial for good subversion. if you don’t know where they would normally go with a conversation, you can’t know where to take a sharp left turn. hence, it’s often important for the joke if you lead people down a path, intentionally. this is typically done through narrative structuring in establishing context.

all this to say, humor is the simple process of establishing a certain subject matter context in a social situation and then subverting other’s expectations around that context with non-sequiters.

ok, cool. that’s pretty simple. so how does it relate to strategy?

sensational question.

good strategic execution is no different in the sense that you lead the opposition down a path by providing them with information that curates a specific type of subject matter context. in simpler terms, you’re feeding them inaccurate information to skew the information environment in your favor so you can strategically deviate and get an outsized payoff in the situation.

in both situations, you’re managing information environments to create a skewed sense of context, so you can deviate from established expectations to receive an outsized benefit. in the case of comedy, this means getting big laughs; in the case of strategy, this means receiving an outsized advantage.

there’s some more in here to be said about using comedy as a profiling method for different demographics, but my attention span ran out and I want to go watch Wimbeldon. cheerio.