People are not just looking for information on the web, they are also looking for entertainment. Some websites gain popularity by being fundamentally useless. But would there be a way to combine merit and fun to make your website stand out from the rest? We’ll look into it.
What is funny?
eHarmony has researched the different types of humor (as a factor of compatibility), and they have found that there are 9 types of them.
- Physical or slapstick was proven to be the most popular overall. Interestingly, the more educated they responded, the less they enjoyed this type of humor. Women also seemed to like it less than men.
- Bodily humor was the second most popular despite being divisive. Teenagers seemed to love it above all other age groups.
- Self-deprecating humor took third place. It was popular among parents, but less among the childless. Women were also much more receptive to this type of humor than men.
- Surreal or ‘Monty Python’- type humor.
- Improvisational
- Wit-Wordplay humor was more popular among more educated participants.
- Topical or ‘Mock The Week’-type humor.
- Observational or everyday-type humor.
- Dark humor came out as the least popular of all forms of humor. Men enjoyed this type of humor more than women unless the men were divorced. Who is laughing now?
What makes a website funny?
There could be examples found for each type of humor, even for bodily humor. But despite their popularity, I can hardly imagine this type of funny being integrated into the corporate world. This reminds me of a quote from Jeremy Goldberg: “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is so hard.” Most of the websites some ways funny are just trying to stay on the safe side of physical humor.
An easy and popular way to make your website more entertaining is by using funny and/or cute illustrations.
This site is literally called Slapstick. They offer an augmented reality app to populate your world with funny little creatures.
The Panda Monk Studio has a robot panda representative on their site that changes clothes constantly.
On the Cabin of code’s homepage, the crew members are drawn as cute little animals.
Bean’s Agency has a funny name and its website design lives up to it.
This digital Pride Festival is an innovative and cute idea as a website and the implementation is a perfect match.
Sometimes adding a fun factor to your website doesn’t take much. Just look at these irregular shapes called Blobz: they have a feel-good vibe without being in any way offensive.
Or take this site by Pierre with its funny cursor animation as an example. Sometimes something as simple as this will do the work just fine.
If you would like to have something like these on the site, but wouldn’t want to place them too prominently, some non-obvious places could be the 404 page and the loading screen (if you have one).
Like this this 404-page example from Cloud Sigma:
Or this one, from Daily UI:
There are also examples of self-deprecating humor found on corporate websites. They are usually focusing on the company and the team, but sometimes even on the products. GoThe about Us page and the contact us page are good places to display such humor
Cultivated Wit’s About Us section is a nice example of this:
If you are looking for a fun Contact Us page, look at Apps:
Wit-wordplay humor can also find its way to the corporate world, mostly through purposefully funny company and product names.
Ikea also seems to have funny product names, though, in reality, their naming convention is very logical.
If you are into a quirkier, more associative type of humor, an easy way to do it would be to use well-known visual reference that doesn’t fit your field of activity. It will create feelings of connection and dissonance at the same time. As an example, here’s a (satiric) website that seems to offer dating services and looks like Amazon.
Summary
As you see humor (and website design) comes in many forms, and I hope you’ll find your best match! At The Cecily Group, we are dedicated to forming a consistent brand strategy from the smallest details up to the big picture. We believe it helps to create and maintain customer trust. We wish you the best of success in finding your path!
