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| [Peter Sagal, Boston MA] |
He opened with a joke about jargon and farts. That's about right. “I have no idea what you do,” Peter quipped amiably to the ballroom packed with marketers, analysts, SEOs, and a lot of people whose job titles seem made-up. "But I'd like to fit in here, so..." He said that for today's audience, he decided he'd sum up his role in broadcast as “disrupting the traditional paradigm in the fart joke sector.”
Slaying the Jargon Beast with fresh, direct writing is about 87% of what I do for marketers and their clients. For example, they tell me their business goals, I convert those into words that normal people can understand. I make website copy convert from "we are the only platform that provides the capabilities to innovate at scale" into something else that conveys actual ideas, and then they give me money. Sometimes I leave my home office and meet Peter Sagal! He is such a pro, moving about the stage
comfortably, interacting, getting genuine
laughs. He didn’t have a slide deck, but he played audio snippets to demonstrate real-life jokes that were written one way, but once told, took on a whole new, unexpected life of their own. He said that the real art of joke-telling is...no way, if I tell it wouldn't be fair to Peter. Okay, I'll tell you if you ask me next time we meet, but only if you donate a dollar to NPR and tell me in the comments below. ∎
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