If you can't be funny, be sincere
Why sincerity is a powerful tool in your arsenal for unfamiliar social environments
A mistake I often see celebrities make when being interviewed by late night hosts: They try to be funny.
It doesn’t always work. In fact it rarely ever works (even amongst great comedians like Bill Burr) because humor depends a lot on the audience’s subjective expectations and personal experiences. You see these celebrities try to tell a funny story about the time they did such and such and it ends up coming off as awkward, rushed, and boring (unless they’ve told that story a thousand times before). The late night hosts don’t always help either, as they’re often more concerned with keeping the clock running and show on air without getting canceled.
You have to know the crowd to be funny.
A joke about Steve Jobs literally not creating the iPhone and therefore being undeserving of so much praise doesn’t work in a crowd of people who believe Steve Jobs was a visionary1. This happens because if you don’t know the crowd, you don’t know the assumptions they’ll hold. And there’s not a lot of time to figure it out either, as these celebrities are often rushed to move on to the next question.
But this doesn’t just apply to celebrities. It can apply to any situation where you’re meeting a group of strangers for the first time and trying to get to know each other (and often does).
So.
What do you do if you don’t have the wit and personal insight to entertain a crowd of people on the fly?
You do the next best thing: If you can’t be funny, be sincere.
There’s something about sincerity that cuts right through any pretentions and the masks we sometimes wear in public (ones we may wear for good reason). People appreciate sincerity when it’s genuine (without self-pity or aggrandizement, but from a place of honest humility).
More importantly, being sincere is a lot easier to do than being funny or charming. Not least because being funny requires precision, insight, and wit. That’s a high bar to meet. And even harder to do for several minutes in a row. Just ask any comedian working on a standup special. In fact it’s often a lot easier to be accidentally funny through sincerity. It’s your “Get out of jail” free card for just about any situation.
What do I mean by that?
Well, I’m sure there’s been a time in your life when you’ve been with a group of people and someone made a joke at your expense that hit a little too close to home. You feel shame, humiliation, and a need to prove that you are not what they think you are.
But instead of taking a moment for honest reflection, you lash out a little, flustered by the situation and instead of moving on with grace and dignity, you give off the impression that maybe the joke was true.
Take for example Eric Weinstein’s reaction to being mocked when Tim Dillon poked fun at what "brilliant people" like Eric have contributed to society when they talk on podcasts all day compared to the inventor of the Rotato, a device which peels potatoes as it rotates them.2
Regardless of whether or not what Tim Dillon said was true, it struck a nerve with Eric and he was annoyed with it enough to talk about it at length on the Joe Rogan podcast, listing his various accomplishments on Twitter, and trying to defend himself from what was clearly a joke (even if it was a bit mean-spirited from Eric’s perspective). By the reactions on YouTube, though, it doesn’t seem like it worked. If anything, people seem to get the impression Tim made a great point and Eric was the one not taking it in stride, flustered and irritated as he seemed to be.
Not a great look for Eric. So what should he have done instead?
Be sincere.
Or as YouTube user “plopplop” puts it so well:
You kill a joke with sincerity. “Actually it is something I’m deeply insecure about because there are moments I wonder if all the things I’ve spent my life learning has benefitted humanity in the slightest. Tim makes people laugh, and I have to dig up a thesis to convince myself I’ve done anything at all.”
It’s never fun roasting a person who is honest about their vulnerabilities. For such a smart guy, you’d think he saw that one.
— plopplop3
Well said.
I thought he was a visionary too.
I couldn’t find the original YouTube clip for this quote, but I still have the screenshot:
