Hacking comedy | Baratunde Thurston | TEDxKC

what's up y'all how are you doing good give yourselves a big round of applause thank you thanks for having me when you write a book that's called how to be black you get some interesting responses especially if you used a very subtle motivating language to get people to acquire the property this is fusion based science right here now I planned a lot for this book but there were some things I couldn't anticipate in the way the internet embraced it visually comedic Lee on Instagram really told an additional story there were people posing with shots of the book in their bookstores in their libraries in their schools and no matter the race of the person involved it's always funny when someone's holding a book called how to be black whether they're super white like this lady here or whether they're white with a very side-eyeing black friends like these brothers right here other species counts and we can even go to a world far far away that moment for me was really enlightening and reminded me of the sort of fusion of the world that I've grown up in a lot of influences that brought me to be able to attack a serious topic with humor with technology with media and it began with my mother I'm a product of my mama this is a picture of her in the 1960s and she was quite a Renaissance woman she was black as you can see professionally though she was politically black she was down with the Pan Africanist movement she was marching in the streets she was ahead of her time when it came to things like biking or kale or Tai Chi and yoga she predicted the future in a way that actually did really really work and my mother was a technologist before that was a hot thing for anybody to do much less a single mother black female in Washington DC in the early 1980s this was a computer programmer she worked for the government coding in COBOL and having that influence in my life led to a lot of other grounding influences to bring me to where I'm headed technology was a big foundation for me I almost became a computer programmer myself I didn't quite do it the placement of the semicolon and how that could just break everything apart that didn't sit well with me I'm like yo compiler you know what I mean the compilers like I have no idea what you're saying so I moved on but I was able to fund my college education in part through technology work and it's obviously played a big part in my life media obsession and knowing things being informed is a huge component of my childhood I remember being in high school classes whenever I might be bored by the teacher I had NPR in one ear to tune in to which let you know that that teacher must have been really really boring if NPR was my escape and politics were unavoidable as a child of DC in the 1980s it was impossible to avoid it as a child of this woman facing the camera in a protest it was impossible to avoid it the first book I can remember reading as a child was this is apartheid a pictorial introduction that is some heavy to give your kid and it makes it impossible to avoid politics after that it's sort of a setting that's hard-coded after that point the other thing it was very important to me and I think should be important to all of us just a quick aside peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they're like an extensible platform you can swap in different breads different spreads different nut based spreads it's really good it's not the focus of my talk maybe another one but I just want to give a shout out to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches keeps America strong but the real groundswell that is sort of the cloud through which I walked in life is one of comedy and it's not because I was funny as a kid I was a very serious little boy I showed you my reading list so it's understandable that I took myself quite seriously but my mother was an adventurer and an explorer and she exposed me and my older sister to the world by the time I was 12 I had seen the entire East Coast we had a very low-cost method of travel and lodging it was known as camping and we would go to various campgrounds and on these road trips listened to comedy we would listen to Whoopi Goldberg and Garrison Keillor and Bill Cosby and it started to tune my ear a little bit by the time I got to high school I was privileged enough to go to a school that had a high speed internet connection and this was internet before images before ads before cat videos it was a simpler time but this internet was full of text-based jokes and I started a mailing list sharing these jokes with my friends by the time I got to college I was a little more sophisticated and I started a satirical newsletter I called it news flash I spelled flash with a pH because it was the 90s and things were fad in the 90s and this winding road led me through strategy consulting around new media through stand-up comedy through political blogging and a side gig bouncing to land at my dream job at America's finest news source finally I had landed at a place that let me combine my love of humor and Technology and politics and media covered by one mediocre healthcare plan it was the American dream and I pondered here and I experimented and I got to play and I got to go even deeper into my instinct and obsession around bringing humor and technology together to such an extent that when I left I started a project that became a company called cultivated wit now this name was borrowed from across millennia from words spoken and written by a man named Horace who said a cultivated wit one that Badgers less can persuade all the more artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than Ken severity alone Horace said his goal was to laugh people out of their vices and Follies and we've never had a higher time for laughter in society than now in part thanks to technology and thanks to the internet look at all the comedic video channels that are out there look at our own president using them in high deadpan comedy to launch an official government program this healthcare program that's an amazing moment for comedy and for technology and maybe for politics as well we've got web comics exploding all across the map and any moment you tune in to Twitter you're tuning into somebody's own comedy channel I will let you enjoy this from the oatmeal it's very enjoyable I'm sorry I punched over talk over your laughter I didn't experiment a short while ago when I wanted to combine my love of math with my love of black people and so I counted black people and I called it Negro spotting and I'm doing it right now actually but I did it at the Republican National Convention and that's a special place to count black people a very special place and what was great was Michelle Malkin's people got very upset at me flame wars ensued but I got a number 143 and that was very good the entire party just 143 black people it's an inspiring time to find people doing their comedy and putting it on the Internet it's also inspiring to find people living humor in places that wasn't designed to host it these miss useful applications of humor a woman named Wendy Davis is running for governor of Texas and she got famous for a long filibuster to combat some restrictions on abortion rights in that state five people are very excited about that she got famous for the shoe she was wearing as well and those shoes got famous for the reviews they got on Amazon here is a sample review of the shoes wendy davis was wearing headline men do not try these on i tried on a pair at the local mall and suddenly texas republicans started telling me what to do with my genitals that's not what amazon had in mind when they built their platform it doesn't matter VIN Mo's another platform it allows you to pay people electronically and in the memo space you can add your own explanation of why you're paying someone ten or twenty or thirty dollars and a lot of these are public it doesn't matter that the space wasn't designed where there's an opening people will fill it with their own creativity I'm very inspired by that and I'm also inspired by a further notion of creating comedy for specific interaction and design moments there is a company called Fox ADHD and they are a gift tastic operation they retell the news using their gift war room through animated looping gifts and it uses the magic of that loop and of that flash to communicate the humor clearly in a way that's more than a static graph could have Hipmunk is another example this is a travel search engine what possible innovation could we bring to searching for airline flights besides price and duration and number of lay overs well they added an ability to sort by agony they roll that all up and they have an adorable chipmunk reducing agony in your life that's hilarious and useful there's another example from a large company we're all familiar with which is Google and this is one of their products Google Voice that lets you send text messages from the internet itself and as you're typing you get a countdown of how many characters you have left and it rolls over when you're in your second message as this one is right now counting down boom what happens that third message Google judges you and it's hilarious and they're right you should send an email and use their other project is called Gmail Eva Hoffman is a Polish American writer and she had something to say about all this she said there's nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face and we have so many strange faces indeed with our techno digitation with the glowing rectangles and black mirrors that consume so much of our time our lives our relationships we're putting efficiency as the high-water mark of what drives all this technological creativity the maximum output from minimum input which is a great philosophy possibly for a factory a terrible philosophy definitely for your sex life some things you want to draw out you know efficiency isn't all that defines humanity and when you think about it further antisocial people are defining all of our social tools how did we get to a world with a kid with no friends define the word friend for a billion people where else do we allow someone with lack of experience to define the experience for millions of others maybe in this building maybe but we don't like it when it happens Eric Sevareid who was part of Edward Armorer's report and Cruz sat next to power without honor the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humor and there was so much power in defining people's relationship to ideas to institutions to each other I'm saying let's add more humor to it my company does an experiential experiment we've done five so far called comedy hack day this is where we bring together developers comedians and designers we lock them in a room we filled that room with beer and whiskey and water and we encourage them to say yes to each other's ideas and construct things together here are some brief examples of what has come out of this experiment you may have found yourself at the office reading something on the internet you'd rather not know your co-workers are that that you rather not know your co-workers know you rather know things that your co-workers know you know you're embarrassed by the you're reading at work answer times a five which makes that look like the New York Times it's a browser plugin adding respectability to your gossip pages useful hilarious collaboratively designed those of you with children will understand how useless and annoying they can be especially around two years old and they want you to read to them but they always want you to read the same thing over and over again and as you do that you get dumber and dumber each time because the opportunity cost of reading those things means you're not reading the New York Times and other credible news sources but what if there were a solution combining those what if there were a tool that let you pick the grown-up news you need and make it look like the children's book they want enter magic story maker which another team built that's actually available in the App Store useful hilarious human innovation we had a team build a virtual pet called my real puppy calm which lets you take care of a puppy and maximize its happiness in its life but it's happiness is always declining no matter how well you take care of it and eventually it dies no matter how much you feed it because life also ends and it's called death it's a very existential hilarious and clearly dark experiment there have been hundreds of ideas pitched and scores built at comedy hack day a social network for serious flossers a berating fitness app which yells at you for not exercising a toilet which masks the sound of your toilet activities with beautiful classical music in its place that's something you want to put in your office tomorrow but my chief example comes back to this building you guys remember when Congress decided they didn't want to be Congress anymore they wanted the money but they shut the whole government down because they were just tired of and a lot of us had the same thought we thought you Congress you the sad world the mess the big clap line so we saw that opportunity we also saw surprisingly that this domain name you Congress com was available it hadn't been pre-registered like in 1800 somebody to invent the Internet just to create this and so we filled it with a beautifully designed Pro America message that no one could be angry with and we gave it levels of interaction the top level lets you flip through stories colorfully retold in a true manner about what the impact of the government shutdown really was level 2 allowed you to engage directly with your specific member of this in August body and level 3 encouraged action beyond that interaction online voter registration and alignment with Route strikers and sunlight foundation to maybe get new members of Congress or affect the process overall comedy is a cathartic exercise it's also a way that we process the world around us it is itself a user interface it's why we turn to The Daily Show and the onion and stand-up comedy and improv it's a way to connect us to each other and to ideas in a way that's palatable and in the techno fabulous future that we're building I'm concerned and want to make sure that we don't leave the encoding of that future to todays coders alone so I want more diverse coders but also want more diverse mindsets people who will bring the arts bring the noise and the funk bring the comedy and the humor and in so doing bring the human I'm calling for us to laugh our way into the future and cultivate our wit I'm calling for us also to eat more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 363,620

Rating: 4.7427001 out of 5

Keywords: Politics, Social Media, ted x, tedx, tedx talk, English, ted talk, United States, ted, Technology, tedx talks, Culture, TEDxTalks, ted talks

Id: ydIumAMjjwg

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 27 2014