The Meme Slide

Everyone loves jokes and memes. The image here is a great example. It’s Bad Joke Dinosaur, and it might work in a slide deck if your audience knows about it but in a lot of cases they won’t. Jokes and memes rely on shared cultural context and it’s often very difficult to know what that context will be for an audience of folk that you’ve never met before at a conference.

I’m not saying don’t put jokes in talks. Just don’t make the talk depend on them. If people don’t get the joke, the talk should still work.

Here’s a really good example a colleague of mine pulled off. He gave a talk on observability and called it “Smells Like Clean Telemetry” which is a Nirvana reference. Throughout, the screenshots had little Nirvana references buried in them, song titles, album titles, band members. The talk made complete sense if you had no idea who Nirvana were, but if you did, it was an added bonus. You got the jokes, but nothing relied on them. That’s what you want.

And a personal example, where I luckily saved myself from a mistake. I made up a talk and was thrilled with the title: “Containers Rule Everything Around Me.” Then about 95% of the people I told about the talk to had no idea what the reference was. Apparently Wu-Tang is not for the kids anymore. This is a reference to a Wu-Tang Clan song “Cash Rules Everything Around Me”, and unless you know that, it means nothing.

You don’t know what references your audience will get, or which joke will land. So, don’t avoid them, just be careful. Don’t make a joke the core of your entire presentation, or you’ll end up with blank faces and people wondering what’s going on.