Yet, each year there are some truly funny spots on TV. How can this be? Many people assume it’s because advertising agencies hire funny writers. But as I will attempt to explain this is not true. Another fallacy many people believe is that advertising agencies hire funny geckos. This is also not true.

The truth is, it’s our clients that are funny. We get to work with really funny people. That’s the secret to what makes for funny advertising—talking frogs and singing rabbits and cavemen that eat at fancy L.A. restaurants are just a byproduct of that.

Before I knew better I thought clients were just people who tucked their button-down shirts into their underwear. Damn. See? Even that’s funny. That’s my point. No matter how folks in advertising hate to admit it, our clients are funnier than we are. Clients live and breathe funny, and they do it in slacks and matching beige shoes. Again, pretty funny.

Still, it is easy to be mistaken and think otherwise. Often people think that it’s the products themselves that are inherently funny like beer, or candy, or laxatives. But they’re not. They’re just products. (OK, laxatives are kind of funny.) And products can never be as funny as the clients who manage them. If pressed, I’d say your general client, especially the senior level dudes, are way funnier than the products themselves. Even if what we’re comparing here is Boar’s Head Ham and Summer’s Eve Douche. Unfortunately these clients, even the senior level dudes, are too smart to let us put them in the commercials, so more often than not we’re stuck having to write about beer and candy and laxatives and ham.

I was so naive when I started in this business. I thought that writers just wrote funny spots on their own. I knew nothing then about clients being the real fountainhead of funny. Even now, at night, when I lay awake begging God to feed me a funny thought for a commercial I sometimes have to ask, “Wouldn’t all commercials be a lot funnier if the clients wrote the spots themselves?” And God says, “Yes.” Then God asks me why I’m sleeping naked and it gets weird from there. Anyhow, I digress.

Clients have rewritten the very definition of funny. Before we agency types recognized this we used to judge funny by asking, “Did it make you laugh?” But now, clients have sophisticated algorithms that know funny. Bars and graphs, and research, and more research so that by the time a spot has completed all of their rigorous tests it is so perfectly funny that people don’t even laugh at it. In the business we refer to that as, “elevating the work.” Thanks to clients, 98 percent of the ads we see are this elevated.

And that’s just the start of it. In every meeting, clients find new ways to crack us up with their boardroom slang. I, for one, was literally in tears the first time I heard clients use phrases like “leveraging the synergy,” and “raising the brand acumen.” Clients have this way of saying things like “empower the consumer holistically” while keeping a straight face. How they do it I don’t know. They’re like Ben Stein crossed with Stone Cold Steve Austin, but with a B.A. in marketing. If it were me up there, I’d be busting up laughing and ruining the joke. But clients are so seasoned in their funny that they can crack us up while looking as unenthused as a Power-Point presentation. I’d give my right arm for that kind of dry wit.

Sometimes it’s hard to take—them being funnier than us. Like when we come in with a clever tagline and they trump us by suggesting not one but three clever taglines to sign off their spot with. Or when we write a spot that provokes a quiet, insightful laugh from the audience, but then they better our concept so that it hits the consumer so hard over the head as to leave them positively delirious. It’s kind of humbling, really. Where we might get insightful chuckles, clients get boffo laughs. Big, well-researched, works-evenly-in-every-region-of-the-country kind of laughs.

Not only are clients funny, they are generously so. It often happens in the business that we are working for months trying to write a script pleasing enough to a client’s funny bone, but failing miserably. That’s when funny clients, as a gift, will throw us a lifeline. Just like us, clients get some of their best ideas in the shower, or from their wives, or sometimes they just offer up a brilliant start, like, “How about something using skateboarding? My teenager is really into that.” Sometimes clients are so damn funny that you can’t help but resent them for it.

And they’re relentless. Just when we think we’re pushing the envelope of funny, clients ask us to push the whole post office. They wonder why we can’t do work for them just like the Martin Agency does for Geico or Chiat does for Apple. And what they mean is that they literally want to do exactly what Geico and Apple have already done. And that in its own way is funny, too. Because repetition is funny, and if you disagree, just consider how well it’s worked for Gallagher.

Some of that repetition comes in the form of knee-slapping funny sentences that can run-on longer then a Kenyan. For example (and this is a direct quote), “One caveat I would be remiss in not mentioning—and it’s truly at this stage just to make us all aware of the variables in play here—is that our product, the product we’re venturing to market here, isn’t such that it lives up to, or will live up to the claim that we’ve committed the brand architecture up to this point. But of course, this is just something minor to keep in mind as we rebrief.” (Maybe you have to work in the business to find this funny. But when you do, it’s The Aristocrats good.)

Before I came to this realization, I used to watch all those spots on TV every night and wonder who is really responsible for all this funny? Is it the writers? The art directors? The director-directors? But now I’ve learned. Sure, some of those people were there when the idea was just a blank sheet of paper and all they had was an infant of a notion. And sure, some of those people were there on the shoot day, when it counted, when the light was dropping out and there were still two more scenes to cover. But now I know who really deserves the credit for all the great spots we get to see night after night: The client. That’s whom we should be thanking for giving us all those gloriously funny product shots.

And that’s who deserves the credit for slugging a guffaw-inducing voiceover on top of an oversized, completely random and redundant title. The same guy who made damn sure that each and every line of the script scored a 150 in both qualitative and quantitative research. The same guy who didn’t second the motion to approve the script, but probably thirded it or fourthed it, who was brave enough to sit back and say nothing, laying nothing on the line to make sure if the script came out to the company’s liking he could take credit for it and if the script came out badly it wouldn’t look like his fault.

So here’s to clients! Because even if we wrote something funny on our own—miracles can happen—this industry just wouldn’t be the same kind of funny without them. Without further sarcasm, here are some of my favorite funny spots of the past year that got through despite clients thinking they could have been funnier.

(TOP) CLIENT: STARBURST, “ERNIE”
AGENCY: TBWA/CHIAT/DAY, NY, www.tbwachiat.com
PREMISE: Ernie is a kleptomaniac and he’s taking advantage of some innocent kid in his neighborhood. Ernie proceeds to take his bicycle, his great dane, the shirt off his back, and even his Starburst. TRUTH: Starburst are worth stealing. Kleptos specialize in that.
WEINER’S TAKE: This is a sweet spot and not because it is for candy. It’s tender and sad but not saccharine. And because Ernie is someone we’ve all experienced growing up it makes it even more tragic when he succeeds. A tragedy I know all too well, because Ernie is my Dad.
CREDITS: CDS: Gerry Graf, Ian Reichenthal, Scott Vitrone; AD: Craig Allen; CW: Ashley Davis; SENIOR PRODUCER: Lora Schulson; PRODUCTION: Epoch Films; DIRECTOR: Matt Aselton; DP: Yo Willems; EDITORS: Gavin Cutler, Mackenzie Cutler