I am a big fan of comedian Louis C.K., and love his show on FX. I have blogged about his lessons for PR before.
Another one recently occurred to me. We had just completed two seminars here at Fusion PR in conjunction with Internet Week NY, about honing the tech PR message, and new launch tactics.
One of the key takeaways actually sounds a lot like Louie’s riff on overstatement, which I share below. It is risque, like much of his stuff, I cleaned it up a bit below, check out the YouTube video above for the uncensored version:
We go right for the top shelf with our words now. We don’t think about how we talk.
We just [go] right to the fxxing, just–“dude, it was amazing.”
” really? you were amazed? You were amazed by a basket of chicken wings? Really? Amazing?
What are you gonna do with the rest of your life now? What if something really great happens to you?
What if jesus comes down from the sky and makes love to you all night long, leaves the new living lord in your belly?
What are you gonna call that?
You used “amazing” on a basket of chicken wings. You’ve limited yourself verbally to a shit life.
He goes on to list other examples, e.g. when people casually throw words like “genius” and “hilarious” around.
It kind of reminded me about the tech industry’s overreliance on hypey words like “revolutionary”, “disruptive”, “game changing”, “paradigm shifting” and, of course, “revolutionary”.
The advice we gave in the seminars was to stay away from such language, sounds very much in line with Louie’s observations. Great minds think alike, I guess!
