A lot of us get into advertising to make people laugh. We want to do funny spots like the moose ad for monster.com or the shark spot for Snickers. Check out Adweek's 18 Great Skittles Ads by TBWA, and you can't help but want to be on the funny wagon.But I'm always reminded of something Luke Sullivan (a really funny guy) said. In his book, he says humor is a dialect, not a language. It's more important to be interesting than just funny.
Funny is good. But it's also really, really hard. And when you miss, it can be painful. Saturday Night Live hires some of the funniest writers in the country, and the show is still wildly hit-and-miss. Lots of weeks it's miss-and-miss.
In this article, Gerry Graf tells Creativity his thoughts on humor. If you've got an account, you should really read it.