Humour and what someone finds funny has to be one of the most subjective things in the world. As a designer you have to be really careful about how you use humour. I would state that really anyone producing work online (and offline) has to consider use of humour carefully. Online humour can get taken in many ways. There are so many instances where attempts at easing the user through humour ends up just putting them off or at worst offending them. My own experience has recently been regarding my spelling of the section as Expresso not Espresso on this blog. It was done so as a joke as I am dyslexic and couple with this I actually liked the notion. Thing was, not many others seem to have got this and after another comment regarding this today I have gone back to plain old Espresso. This just illustrates what I thought was humour just confused people and may have even put others off my site.
The hardest aspect of humour is sarcasm when it comes to being online. I have encountered this so many times on messenging, emails, forums and blogs. Something that out loud would have people rolling on the floor in laughter – unless they have had their sarcasm bone removed – online can result in flaming, insults and offence large enough to put around the entire world. I’ve had personal experience of this in blog posts and I expect so have many others. In your own blog space (depending on the exposure and your aims) you can speak your mind and readers get used in general to your “humour” voice. This is of course, something that the new reader will not know and this causes issues in itself. If you are talking about a non-personal project the use of humour has to really be carefully thought about.
When it comes to actually using humour in your design it is something of a dangerous balancing act of finding a humour that spreads across cultures and any other difference in your viewers. Bare in mind that what is thought of as funny changes in countries, cultural groups and probably by the individual too. Our sense of humour is taken from so many aspects of our background and experiences – finding something that hits all is often hard. The psychology of what people find is funny or not really is interesting and boils down to the differences in life experiences. It can even vary depending on the current mood of the viewer or the atmosphere they are in. When it comes to humour, humans are a bit funny about the way they interpret it.
Humour is hard to get right when it’s text-based (not necessarily just online), I think. You lack the visual cues like facial expression, gestures, the reaction of others, etc. and are left with really nothing more than punctuation and letters. And tone of voice is especially hard – you can’t hear if someone’s being sarcastic or deadly serious, you can only interpret from what’s written. I, for one, got the "Expresso"!
Hehe thanks. There is so much body language we take cues from as humans. This proven by what happens when they are taken away. Most people ‘hear’ their own voice when reading so I agree on the voice too.
Humour is often one of those "spare-of-the-moment" aspects of communication. Whilst it often works in conversation it can often seem forced and unnatural in writing. It takes a great deal of skill to achieve. Sorry I didnt get the "Expresso" joke, but that’s perhaps because I cannot spell without MS Word to save my life. It looked correct to me!