Funny is a skeleton, not a garnish

We spent an evening making a 60-second video about the company funnier, and the interesting part is how many ways that failed before it worked.

The first attempt did what everyone does: keep the script, sprinkle jokes. Add a metaphor here, a self-deprecating aside there. Version 6 had three good metaphors and still read as a serious script wearing a funny hat. We could feel it immediately — “closer, but no.”

What worked was different in kind, not degree. We pasted five stand-up bits we actually love and said: learn the essence, rewrite. The essence turned out to be structural, not verbal. Those bits share a skeleton: a bold declarative premise stated like it’s obviously true; a triplet of parallel evidence sentences; a self-deprecating undercut; and a closer built from one hyper-specific remembered detail. Version 7 didn’t add jokes to our script — it poured our facts into that skeleton. It passed on the first read.

The lesson generalizes past humor: style transfer at the sentence level fails where structure transfer succeeds. If a reference text has a quality you want, the quality usually lives in its load-bearing frame, not its decorations. Transplant the frame.

The second lesson came from over-correcting. A later two-speaker version was rejected as “too much like stand-up,” so we cut punchlines, filler, and speaker switches all at once — and got back a script that sounded like an IELTS speaking exam. Untangling that taught us the knobs are independent: speaker-switch frequencycontrols how “performed” it feels, punchline density controls how funny it is, and sentence completeness controls how much it sounds like an exam answer. Turning one knob while holding the others is the only way to converge; turning them together is why edit loops oscillate.

Both lessons are now house method: when a draft needs a quality it lacks, ask for reference material the requester genuinely loves, extract the skeleton, and rewrite into it — and when feedback says “too X,” identify which single knob controls X before touching anything.