Brands have a Corgi problem
On the comedy of surrender and the tragedy of brand restraint.
A corgi running. Legs that don’t match the body. A body that doesn’t match the ambition. Full sprint anyway.
Few things are more gloriously hilarious, naturally ridiculous, and ultimately, real.
A person singing in their car at a red light. Eyes closed on the high note. Then they see you. Then they become someone else entirely.
Farts. Funny in 1900 BC Sumeria. Funny right now. Four thousand years of civilization and we still can't keep it together in the face of flatulence.
Armpit hair. Just there. Doing what? Who the hell knows.
Someone slipping on ice. Henri Bergson wrote a whole philosophy about why this is funny. The philosophy is less funny than watching someone slipping.
All of this is real. All of it is natural. All, ungovernable. The reason it’s funny is the same reason it’s important: you can’t control any of it. There’s great comedy in the surrender of being a human on Earth.
We are, every single one of us, absurd. We’ve tripped on our own feet. We’ve pushed doors that said pull. We’ve said "you too" when someone said happy birthday. We’ve all checked behind the shower curtain for the invisible murderer. We are weird, goofy beings who do unhinged, clownish things.
I mean, milk, am I right? Someone looked at a cow; a big, wet-nosed, thousand-pound animal just standing in a field. They looked at the udders. Dangling…glistening. Their next thought?
I’m going in.
Worse, they convinced other people to do the same. And they just... agreed. Then we put it in every refrigerator on the planet. We put it in coffee. We give it to children. We made cheese, which is somehow even weirder. Definitely one we’ll need to explain when the aliens show up.
It doesn’t matter if you’re as brainy as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, as elegant as Anne Hathaway, or as athletic as LeBron James. You’re a goober and so are they.
I mean, you, right now, a grown adult, still spell “Wednesday” as Wed-nes-day in your head. Every time, you silly bastard.
This is the raw material of being a person.
And corporations, and the brands that need to relate to people, won’t touch it.
Not because they don’t get the joke. Because the joke requires giving up control. And a brand that has spent $40 million on consistency guidelines, legal review, and a 47-person approval chain cannot, by definition, surrender to anything.
That’s the tragedy. The funniest, most magnetic brands have always been the ones that figured out how to let go just enough. To leave a rough edge. To admit that life is ridiculous. They know it. They know you know it. And they let that be the common thread.
Most brands would rather be forgettable than undignified. Their board of MBAs prefer remaining safe, predictable, and invisible. They'd choose to say nothing over risking looking silly. And that is the silliest thing of all.
So, as strange, awkward and dopey as you may be, you'll never be as asinine as a brand that spent millions trying not to be.
Stay dumb and fun, everyone. 👋