Gary here, on another titillating Friday living my passion: private detectiving. On a dispatch call with my boss this morning I tried to sign off with, “Welp, as they say, TGIG!” That stands for Thank God It’s Gary—a joke I’ve made every Friday since I was 22 and according to court documents, the reason my first wife Judy divorced me. My boss didn’t like it any more than Judy did and replied with a brusque, “Cut the funny business and get back to work!” Sheesh, someone woke up on the wrong side of the waterbed, is the comeback I said only in my head as we hung up. Anyhoo, I’ve been out here for 4 hours already trying to get more intel on Obedient. At my last count, I have 17 mosquito bites and 2 bites I can’t categorize (even my Pocket Bug Bite Photo Glossary didn’t help).

But onto the Garylog for today. The Obedient team has been ‘nerding out’ (I saw Dale use this expression in a tweet once) over the neuroscience and cognitive research on why humor works so well. My boss is NOT gonna be happy to learn that there’s more proof that humor marketing is ‘the tits,’ (another thing I saw Dale tweet the other day).

Here’s what I wrote down from today’s spying (my comments in parenthesis)

• Humor systematically activates the brain’s dopamine reward system. (woah!)

• Dopamine helps with learning and recall, goal-oriented motivation, and long-term memory (Double woah!)

• There are only 3 primary emotions that release adrenaline into your system—which cements the experience in your brain—fear, grief, and laughter. (My boss loves using those first two in his marketing campaigns.)

• Positivity + the power of laughter = captivating, memorable, motivating campaigns. (Uh oh.)

Welp, my mind is blown. More blown than the time I successfully made root beer moats by forming a castle out of vanilla ice cream and surrounding it with root beer. It was a huge mess and Judy was—to put it bluntly—PEEVED.

Signing off, Gar