I am a man of refined comedic tastes. I appreciate the classics. I savor the old vaudeville ways; the set-up and the punch, the old switcheroo. The skedaddle-a-paddle, so to speak. But that doesn’t mean I do not appreciate the new humor. Or as the kids now days call them: the “MeMe’s”.

In fact, a while back, just to show myself that I wasn’t getting lost in the dust of comedic history, I subjected myself to a 3 month challenge of creating 5 original pieces of static internet comedy a week, which I then later extended out to 6 months. Which is about 120 individual pieces.

The rules I set for myself were simple – they needed to be created wholly by myself, and had to be net new. F’r’instance, I could not “meme” something someone else had said, though, piling on was perfectly okay (in this case “piling on” meant that I could take an existing meme template and change its direction or add my own twist).

The end results needed to fit the audience of the page upon which they would be posted, in this case facebook.com/SLCNerd – a page that I still maintain from a previous series of live events that I created as a side project at mediaRif, the ad/marketing agency at which I was a partner.

Here is a sampling of some of my favorite pieces (with very minor commentary):

Yeah, yeah, I know. But this is comedy, no one is safe.

If you know me in real life, you already know that I have a serious weakness for Schrödinger humor.

I am still a bit suprised that I didn’t find someone had already done this, and secretly suspect that I didn’t search as diligently as I shoud have just so I could make it myself.

Sometimes the joke falls into place after you have decided on what the images are going to be.

When I first started playing around with mash-up tools and learning how to do it, I found a perfect Kool Aid image already cut out, and I tried to use it in everything. This one worked the best.

This one turned out flawlessly if I do say so myself.

I think we forget sometimes the pure power of the prose of Dune and pictures of cute little kids. Try it. It is amazing.

And finally, I probably spent way too much time searching for the right pics to use in this and building it all out. But it still makes me laugh. And it was perfectly targeted on a Utah audience. Visual puns are better than word puns every day.

Overall, it was a great and fun learning experience, and I was able to take a lot of what I learned on this silly personal exercise and apply it to a Social Media Campaign that I built for the Utah State Fair (I will post some of my favorites from the five years that I did that and show more clearly adapting the meme form to be Brand friendly).

And if there is interest, I could post all of the pieces that I did for this Self-Challenge.

If you are looking at how to mix a little humor into your brand’s social media post, let’s definitely chat. I would be more than thrilled to share some of the fun things I love to do and how to stay high concept, low cost, but still on brand.