Re: Humor as a communication technique

[Lisa Higgins <lisarea -at- LUCENT -dot- COM>]

> Case in point.  What moves you and makes you think more: A movie like Contact or
> the Truman Show?  Or a documentary on the sociological ramifications of alien
> contact or loss of personal identity?  Let's face it, documentaries can be
> interesting, but they rarely move you or make you really think about things.

WHAAAAA?!?!?!? Oh, this just ain't so. Really stupid documentaries
with dorky, monotone voiceovers tend toward boring, but I can name
many documentaries that I've found very entertaining and educational.
The Thin Blue Line, Brother's Keeper, and Manufacturing Consent*, for
three.

And you'll find the same thing with technical documents, too. Humor
is one device you can use to create an interesting, engaging
document, but it's not the only one.

I watch, at most, an hour of television a month, and when I do, I
generally end up feeling sort of ill. Sitcoms are the opposite of
funny, and it seems that the more unfunny they are, the better their
ratings.

To the many existential hells I've accumulated over my life, I will
now add "reading a 'humorous' technical document written by someone
who thinks Tim Allen is funny."

I also should add that it is ALWAYS a bad idea to put anything
superfluous--background information, tangential stuff, cute
analogies, jokes, etc.--in what I call 'angry docs.' This includes
help files and any sort of last-resort documents that nobody's going
to look at until they've been struggling with a problem for an hour
and are ready to put their fist through a wall. Nothing is funny to
these guys.

This is not to say that it can't work, ever. Larry Wall manages to be
funny and to communicate technical concepts at the same time, but
most of us are not Larry Wall.

Lisa Higgins.
lisarea -at- lucent -dot- com

*OK, some of the entertainment value of Manufacturing Consent was
unintentional.