Afterwit
We’ve all had our afterwit moments. We’ve all experienced wisdom after the event. That thing you could’ve said to win the day or score some points. The witty retort. The arch remark. The bon mot that Oscar Wilde would have been proud of. It’s so frustrating to be the wisegal or the wiseguy with the wisecrack knowing that the moment has slipped away.
Afterwit is an archaic English word that captures that feeling. I love it. It sounds like a direct translation of one of those fabulous German compound nouns.
The French call it l’esprit de l’escalier (wit of the stairs). The thing that you should have said in the meeting, but which only occurs to you on the stairs down to the lobby on your way out. If only.
Well here are a couple of afterwits from me. I wish I’d included them in recent posts, but they only occurred to me afterwards.
We wanna be together
I should have signed off my post about belonging with this classic ad for Prudential.
I’m not sure they make them like this any more. I hope they do. I wouldn’t say that dialogue is a lost art in advertising but it does feel like an art the industry is determined to lose; comedy dialogue in particular. If I were a client, I’d never rely on a voiceover to carry the keystone message in a telly ad. It’s too easy to tune out. If you’re only half-watching something, you’re going to focus on the pictures, not the commentary. But someone speaking to camera is a different story. We’re hardwired to be interested in people talking. The voiceover in this Prudential ad is at least blessedly short, is carefully placed over a lull in the action, and makes sense of what has gone before. Nonetheless it’s obliterated by the, “We wanna be together” punchline that follows.
(Why did they choose a bloke to do the voiceover for an ad about female financial independence?)
A catchy aside
If dialogue is underrated and underused, catchiness is sniffed at and looked down upon. I dunno why. Why ignore a simple and effective way to be remembered? Jingles FTW.
I remember “We wanna be together” being sampled from the Prudential ad and used in a dance tune at the time. I got a bee in my bonnet and spent far too much time trying to find it again. Turns out it wasn’t a sample. It was more of an homage or a parody from Parkhill International. They recorded someone saying “I wanna be together” and other similar-but-not-identical lines from the ad, using a similar-but-not-identical Birmingham accent. People went nuts for this track back then (1992). The power of catchy dialogue.
I’ll tell you who’s not afraid to be catchy. He’ll be silly or even corny to be catchy if he has to. He doesn’t need an excuse. Adam Buxton, that’s who. I’ve had the self-written and self-performed jingles from his podcast stuck in my head for weeks.
The jingle at the end of the podcast is called, “Like and Subscribe.” It’s stupid and brilliant. It’s just his podcast call to action repeated over and over and over. But it’s also smart and funny and catchy, and it builds his brand. This is known in the trade as “bothism”: investing in both performance marketing and brand building. In this case Buxton does both jobs simultaneously. Both-at-once-ism.
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Nice little pat when me bum’s upAdam Buxton, Like & Subscribe
Steve Coogan not being funny
Another afterwit. My last post was about good questions. I should have included this one. It was a belter.
In 2015 I watched Steve Coogan being interviewed in the magical central piazza of Portmeirion at the sublime and sorely missed Festival No. 6. The interview was dull, despite the potentially interesting topics. The problem was that Coogan told us up front that he wasn’t going to be funny. “They’re not paying me enough to be funny.” And he meant it. I think he thought that would get a laugh. It didn’t. It didn’t deserve one.
I first saw Coogan at a Bass Brewers conference in Birmingham. He was the after-dinner entertainment. He was clawing his way up at the time, a long way from having the luxury of choosing whether or not to be funny. I remember feeling sorry for him. He was funny. He was doing some of the characters he became famous for, like Paul Calf. And he was playing to a full room. Sadly, most of the room had its back to him. Hardbitten Bass Brewers salespeople were letting their hair down and swapping on-trade war stories with seldom-seen colleagues. They were drinking heavily and laughing a lot, but not at Coogan. He must have played a lot of dispiriting gigs like this. Maybe he earned the right to hold back and be surly every now and then. Maybe this was him getting his own back in Portmeirion.
Most people stuck around for the entire interview, despite its inauspicious start, wrongly assuming that he’d break po-faced character at some point and say something funny. He didn’t. He was serious about playing it straight and flat.
So we’d had 45 minutes of steadfast, deadpan earnestness. Then they opened it up for questions from the audience.
Steve, do you live in a hard water or a soft water area?
This brought the house down. It was an incongruous question to say the least. But we all knew that it was exactly the kind of trivial but nerdy topic that Coogan’s most famous creation, Alan Partridge, would love to monologue about. Coogan knew it too. And he’d been upstaged for laughs by a member of his audience. He had no choice but to respond in kind. Or he couldn’t help himself. Either way, he got funny in the end. I said in my post that a good question rocks the boat in a useful way. This was a great question.
And look, the question is even mentioned in this review of Day 2 of the festival. It’s what everyone remembers. I can’t believe I found this.
Afterwit postscript
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I’m no Adam Buxton. Sorry.
Maybe try this too: Magicians and conspirators. A post about human creative endeavour, about people having ideas and making them happen together. It got some action on LinkedIn the other day. Woo hoo!