{"id":809,"date":"2013-04-03T18:48:19","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T18:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediashower.com\/blog\/?p=809"},"modified":"2013-04-08T15:28:04","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T15:28:04","slug":"creating-comedy-what-i-learned-from-zug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mediashower.com\/blog\/creating-comedy-what-i-learned-from-zug\/","title":{"rendered":"Comedy Lessons: What I Learned from ZUG"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you feel the earth tremble\u00a0this week? Perhaps you did,\u00a0and we know why. What you felt was\u00a0the jolt of ZUG.com, the world’s greatest comedy website since 1995, finally closing its online\u00a0doors\u00a0on April 1st. This time, there was no fooling.<\/p>\n

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The fat lady done sung.<\/p><\/div>\n

I was one of Zug’s main contributors of comedy content since 2011, and I had the great honor of serving as the site’s managing editor over the past year. I learned\u00a0what it takes to run a high profile website, how to manage a stable of writers, and the art of feeding the beast that is creative comedy. Perhaps you can glean a smidgen of wisdom from the lessons I learned.<\/p>\n

Creative Wit Can Hatch from the Driest Eggs
\n<\/strong>Pretty bizarre subheading there, huh? What I mean by that is no matter what your company specializes in, an injection of fresh and funny\u00a0is\u00a0always possible. This is\u00a0one of our trademarks at Media Shower, and it applied to ZUG as well. When an office furniture store was looking for\u00a0content\u00a0that would get them\u00a0some attention,\u00a0I challenged myself to see if one of their ergonomic office chairs could keep me comfortable—no matter what. That meant sitting in the chair in traffic, in front of an adult toy store, and even in the ocean. We took a mundane topic, office chairs, and turned it into a hysterical piece of viral comedy. This technique can be used by any business at any time, with only some slight adjustments being made for tone and subject matter.<\/p>\n

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Honking horns? Nope, still comfortable.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Permission-Forgiveness Ratio
\n<\/strong>Perhaps it’s because ZUG was the number one\u00a0source for pranks for 18 years, but we never really learned how to\u00a0ask for permission before pulling off a stunt. Whether it was sneaking into the Super Bowl for the\u00a0 infamous halftime Prince prank<\/a> or simply doing stand-up comedy inside a Walgreens<\/a>, we learned early on that asking the powers that be\u00a0for permission to do stupid stuff in their presence\u00a0was just not gonna work. It also would drain\u00a0the\u00a0comedic value out of whatever we were doing. The element of surprise can’t be overestimated when planning to make a big splash.<\/p>\n