CLOSE-UP: CRAFT/CAMPAIGN SCREEN INTERVIEW - Comedy guru teaching 'angry art' to the advertising industry. Robert McKee believes that comedy in ads is all in the set-up, Lisa Campbell says.(Brief Article)

Dogs, sex and babes in bikinis. No, we're not talking Saatchi & Saatchi's Agency of the Year shindig, but common themes at this year's Cannes Advertising Festival, according to the weary jury. And the one thing uniting these disparate ideas was humour or, more precisely, attempts at it.

Paul Briginshaw, the creative director at Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy, was one judge who left rather depressed by it all. 'I'm a bit concerned about the world's advertising. There were a lot of lame jokes and poorly thought out and executed ads.'

For the inexperienced, humour is often the second bright idea, after 'let's use sex!', and it is erroneously considered an easy thing to do. Humorous ads can fall into several traps:

 
1) They are not funny. 
2) They are funny but have no strategic insight or relevance to the 
brand. They are simply 'gags with tags'. 
3) Once you've seen them a few times, they not only wear a bit thin, but 
become irritants. 
4) You can't predict how viewers will respond to humour in advertising 
and there's little in the way of research to help you out. In fact, it's 
a wonder that clients allow their precious budget to be gambled on such 
a fragile concept. 

'Whassup?' transgressed cultural boundaries and became part of the vernacular - as well as increasing sales of Budweiser - while John West Salmon's 'bear' was recently voted the world's best commercial in the US, where it was not even broadcast on TV. It was thanks to people e-mailing the ad to their friends that it spread like wildfire around the world.

So what is the key to comedy and, more importantly, can it be taught?

According to the screen-writing guru Robert McKee, comedy is a craft like any other and certain techniques can be taught. 'But you cannot teach someone who is fundamentally not funny to be funny,' he warns.