Joking Your Way On To the Airwaves

Everybody loves a good laugh or chuckle; reporters are no exception. If you crack a joke or say something humorous in front of a reporter, there is a good chance your quip will end up in the broadcast report or tomorrow’s newspaper. Humor is always quotable.

Warning! Humor can be tricky business for the executive communicator. What seems funny among colleagues, friends, or a "friendly” journalist at 5:30 PM might not seem so funny tomorrow morning when you are reading your comments in the Daily Bugle. Please keep in mind, you can be a highly effective and skilled communicator and never use humor to get your point across through the media.

Sarcasm and teasing types of humor usually don’t work well in the media because you lose control of context and, in the case of print media; you lose the ability to communicate with your voice and facial expressions. Typically, the humor that is most effective is self-deprecating humor.
"I refuse to make my opponent’s youth and inexperience an issue in this campaign," said Ronald Reagan during the 1984 Presidential Debate against Walter Mondale.

This was funny and effective because Reagan directed the humor at himself. Nobody thought Mondale was too young or inexperienced; whereas sizeable portions of the public were concerned that Reagan was too old and seemed "out of it” during the previous debate.

Reagan’s skillful use of self-deprecating humor defused the age issue during the rest of the campaign.

The problem with using humor in front of the media is that someone somewhere is likely to be offended, and now there is a permanent public record of your remarks.

For example, a congressman I once worked for was unhappy with some renovations being made on the US Capitol. He said, "This couldn’t look worse if it were made out of cinder blocks." The comments elicited a few chuckles at the time. But the next day, after the comments were recorded in the local newspapers, his office received an angry letter from the National Association of Cinder Block Manufacturers. "How dare you imply cinder blocks are anything other than a thing of beauty to behold," was the gist of their message.
This is why most politicians (and others who appear in the media frequently) appear to be humorless. At some point in their career, they tried out a joke and were punished by some organized group (and I’m not referring to obviously distasteful jokes that make fun of people on the basis of sex, class, creed or race).
So, quip if you must, quip at your own expense, and quip at your own risk.

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