Confounding Expectations: Humor and Signal

A while ago, I went to hear Chuck Palahniuk speak at Seattle Town Hall, and while he was speaking he said a lot of really entertaining things, but he also said some really interesting things about communication in general. He said that the basis of humor is surprising people, telling them something that they’re not expecting to hear. In his context ( like say in fight club), there’s usually a stark difference between how people act and how we expect them to in everyday life. In addition to all the other sorts of reactions his work provokes, there’s usually some shockingly funny stuff there.

So, that’s humor. But what about other things. Generally, most of us go through life in a state of continuous partial attention, and people find themselves not ever really focusing on one particular thing, too distracted by one thing or another to ever actually get anything done. One reaction to this is the whole Getting Things Done system for actually doing things. It’s very oriented towards keeping tasks somewhat minutely focused, and scoping tasks in and out as needed. I’m not a big fan of GTD, because it’s designed to solve a different personal organization problem than I usually have,

Claude Shannon described a problem of identifying information in his paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. In it, he describes information as that which you can’t predict from the previously received parts of the message. So, basically, successful time-management people are able to discriminate between the new information (where they focus) and the rest (where they pay continuous partial attention.) You see people attempting to do this (and usually failing) when they’re using their laptops in meetings. Get Things Done is a management strategy for people who are bad at this (and most are.)

When giving information (presenting, teaching, etc…) I try to give people information in a way that allows for this behavior, pushing the main themes much more than the subsidiary and supporting information. This allows the constant partial attention people to blink in and out. However, I also use a lot of humor to get my point across, and to keep people paying attention. Until I was reflecting on Palahniuk’s talk this morning, I didn’t see how this is essentially the same strategy — by confounding the expectations of what people are expecting to hear, you force them to pay closer attention.