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Content Couldn’t Save The King
by Augi Garred

You’ve heard it all before: "Content is king." "What good is the web if all the content stinks?" And, "My older brother is going to beat you up!" The question I want to ask is, if content is king, then why do so many comedians tell stupid jokes?

ASK YOURSELF THIS QUESTION

"But is it funny?" That’s a question that Dave always used to pose to me when we wrote skits for Rippen Ried Productions. After spending a decent amount of time in initial concepting, I’d write a first draft for a skit, bring it to the performing group, and then we’d run through it. This is where we would quickly determine what did and didn’t work. Testing the material on this first run would show weak spots, rhythmic disturbances, and that all-important question to the entertainer - is it funny? If the group wasn’t cracking up while we were rehearsing the material, then there was a really good chance that the audience wouldn’t laugh, either. So we’d work together to make it funny. Sometimes that would happen instantaneously through an improvised line, or it would take a few days of painstaking rewrites to get that stomach-busting line of genius. Most of the time it just took a few beers, but you didn’t hear me say it.

Now that we had a decent draft laid out, we rehearsed and rehearsed and (guess!)…rehearsed some more! If you’ve ever practiced with any kind of performing group, you know how much fun this time can be. Love spreads around the room like flowers in bloom, patience is king, and everyone hugs. It’s like a Hare Krishna festival with peace symbols floating in perfumed air. Oh, the fun, the joy, the warm embraces! Soon, you find yourself addressing your brethren as "asshole!" "jackass!" and an entire dictionary of creative terms that I will leave up to your imagination. This is the truth of finding that state of perfection in a performance, similar to what many of us experience in the business world during days of grueling project work and all-out battles for the great idea! Hey, it’s just part of the play. As long as you know it going in, you’ll live…and even learn to thrive on it.

But I am getting sidetracked here. Let’s get back to content.

Finally, the big day would arrive. We’d sit in some lonely little room awaiting our entrance; hearts pounding; minds focused; a little nervous. After all that development, preparation, and practice; the hours of working out timing, inflection, movement; the moments sitting with the notebook writing out ideas and seeing a concept slowly come to life; it all came down to this: the performance.

And then, like a small herd of squirrels running across the floor, the applause would precede our entrance and we were ON. Scripts in hand, everyone on their marks, we’d begin. And here’s where the true test of content came in to play (pun intended).

If the audience laughed as we anticipated, we knew we’d hit our mark. And most of the time they did laugh. Occasionally we’d be off on what we felt the audience would respond to, but that was expected, too. We just needed to remind ourselves that everyone responds differently to humor, and it’s ok to be off in small amounts. The trick was, to hit them where it hurt as much as possible; to score the goal, so to speak; to know the secret of their humor "locus," and to distract them just long enough for them to forget about their problems, their pains, and focus instead on the fools - (us) - on stage.

If there is anything I learned about content during this time, it was that the material had to connect with the audience or it would bomb. What I also learned is that the performance of the material was equally important to the content. If one of our actors had bad timing, the material couldn’t save them.

JIM CARREY LIKES TOFU
If you gave Jim Carrey a piece of tofu, he would find a way to make something funny out of it. He would because he’s so experienced at making all the world his stage, anything is game. But if you gave that same piece of tofu to, say, George W. Bush, the audience would fall into a, shall I say, coma?

The same is true of web site content. It’s not only that the material is relevant and has meaning to the audience, but that the content is delivered in a manner which supports that content. What does that mean? Great architecture, design, functionality, and usability. You know the sites I speak of - the article you ripped out of a magazine while you were on that flight to Chicago and couldn’t wait to get to your hotel room and look up the URL. You got there and what did you find? Maybe the design was brilliant, but the information was lame. Or the information was amazing, but you had to actually work to find it because the IA (information architecture) was poorly thought out. I don’t know about you, but when someone promises me an experience, I have high expectations for what that means. And when it’s not delivered, I do what any grown man would do - I cry.

In the end, it’s both the content and the delivery of the content that makes a great site, magazine, or play. Content alone is not king. And I’ll leg wrestle anyone who says otherwise.

Fortunately, as human beings, we are a curious sort. We have this amazing little thing called "hope" that keeps us going. And this quality creates the belief that we’ll find something unbelievable out there in the world - whether it’s the Bhagavad-Gita, a pill that transforms us into flying turtles, or that Spielberg will (please!) make a sequel to E.T. - hope drives us to discover what, as my dad always says, "What’s around the next corner?"

All I can hope is that it’s a web site that teaches me how to turn tofu into $100 bills.