Pop culture anchoring

TJ's note: I was just going through my Word files and found a chapter from the eBook I'm working on. Enjoy ("PUA post" style :))

Pop culture anchoring

Intro

Pop culture is a social force that binds us with a collective unconscious. Advertising, movies, radio, Internet, and television constantly bombard our senses which condition our tastes, behaviors, memories, and, for some, our lives. While many people – pickup artists and civilians alike – view this “socially conditioning” as restrictive, they fail to recognize the possibility such a collective social unconscious offers:

The possibility of superficial rapport.

A label like “superficial rapport” sounds like an oxymoron and, in a lot of ways, it is. It has to be. Because it has to answer a paradoxical, counter-intuitive question: How can strangers quickly connect and build rapport in a way where neither person ostensibly forfeits their social power?

Let’s examine that question.

Strangers overcome their “strangeness” and forge relationships by displaying their personality and establishing commonalities. Even when “opposites attract”, for one person to even learn another person is their “opposite” requires that both display their interests, opinions, and tastes before they can attract.

However, merely fishing for commonalities with a stranger is a try-hard, abrasive approach. Interview-style questions like “What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you do?” are vapid, emotionless, and obscure finding out someone’s unique style, taste, and personality. Rightfully, most people (especially attractive women) refuse to waste time answering such questions from a stranger who has not differentiated himself from the hordes of other strangers who asked the exact same lifeless string of questions.

Rarely are we just given genuine answers to personal questions, we must earn them. And everything we earn in a social interaction is through value.

We gain social value in countless ways – though most lack rapport. For example, say a guy learns a simple magic trick like making a saltshaker disappear. While the trick may awe strangers and pump the guy’s value, the approach does not establish any connection between him and the strangers. He was merely entertaining. The same is true of the guy who learns to play a Dave Mathew’s song on the guitar. Or the guy who parrots someone else’s canned opener. While it may boast the performer’s momentary value, questions still remain: Who is this guy? How does this relate to me? Why should I continue talking to him once he stops being entertaining?

So, for strangers, pop culture is the bridge between value and rapport. Pop culture’s ubiquity spins a web that both traps and connects us. Since we all recognize and understand the same pop icons, moments, and clichés, we have a wealth of emotions to draw from, a gallery of faces to reference, a spectrum of body types to compare to, and a spattering of relatable personalities to analogize. While the characters we meet in TV shows, movies, and books are fictional, we still feel we know them better than most people we meet – perhaps even better than some of our own friends!

Once we acknowledge this, we have access to an unlimited number of ways to connect with strangers as simply as if discussing old friends and mutual acquaintances.

Methods

Metaphor

For a quick laugh, making an outrageous pop culture comparison consistently hits. Additionally, the metaphor or simile emotes on several levels and has the seeds for various other threads. If I simply say, “I saw a nerd walking down the street”, I haven’t cashed in the sentence’s comedic keyword (nerd). The label nerd, while chuckle-worthy, won’t elicit any big laughs because it’s not specific. Now, if I were to say, “I saw this nerd walking down the street that looked like Minkus from Boy Meets World”, I would get a bigger laugh. By specifically referencing Minkus, I’m not only painting a vivid word-picture, I’m also categorizing his personality and style. The variety of nerds can range from a Minkus-looking nerd to an Urquel-looking nerd to a Booger from Revenge of the Nerds-style nerd (to name only a few). In each case, you have a different set of physical attributes (skinny nerd, black nerd, fat nerd, respectively), a different social environment (school acquaintance nerd, next-door-neighbor nerd, college nerd), a different nerd role (antagonist nerd, lovable loser nerd, somewhat-cool nerd). Again, this only lists a few of the infinite number of contexts you can attach to a pop culture metaphor.

However, once you establish the context you want to highlight, you can amplify the humor by spotlighting it. For example, say I’m telling a story about seeing a nerd (who looked like Minkus) and he gave me the finger for no reason. The story’s humor hinges on the nerd’s absurdly unwarranted behavior. If I said, “I saw this nerd walking down the street that looked like Minkus from Boy Meets World. As he walked by, he totally flipped me off! Seriously, the guy looked just like Minkus – he even had the dorky argyle sweater and awful glasses!”, I’d be focusing on the wrong context. The humor is not because the nerd looked exactly like Minkus – rather it’s because Minkus was such a timid (though bitterly repressed) character on the show, imagining him flipping someone off is funny.

So, to highlight the context of Minkus’s behavior, we could say, “I saw this nerd walking down the street that looked like Minkus from Boy Meets World. As he walked by, he totally flipped me off! Seriously, maybe Minkus mistook me for that piece of trailer-trash Shawn Hunter and thought I stole Tapanga from him or some shit. Whatever, I’m totally telling Mr. Finni Monday morning.” Now that will get a big laugh. Why? Because I isolated the humor in the story (a nerd acting ridiculously), tied the abstract word “nerd” to a relatable icon (Minkus), then I figured out what context to relate my Minkus metaphor to (Minkus’s timid, bitterly repressed behavior), and made a wacky analogy that ties into the plotline of the show (Shawn Hunter stealing Minkus’s unrequited love interest)*.

* For all you hardcore Boy Meets World fans who are all upset because it was actually Cory – not Shawn – who pursued (and stole) Tapanga from Minkus, stop your crying and recognize my comedy of error: 1.) I got to use the adjective “trailer-trash” to describe Shawn (funny in itself); 2.) It calls for the listeners’ input since they can correct you, leading to a Boy Meets World vibe session; 3.) It keeps you from looking totally try-hard as if you are IMDBing the logistics of awful TGIF t.v. shows.

So let’s focus on specific metaphors we can use.

People

By far the best way to anchor a story, line, or routine back to pop culture is to reference a specific person. People fascinate people. Just picture a typical women’s magazine. Celebrities saturate its pages. We are privy to other people’s personal lives as their intimate details are exposed for our entertainment daily – whether it’s a real personal crisis (i.e. the Britney meltdown) or fictional drama played out on t.v. or the movies. Regardless, the notoriety of celebrities offers us an unlimited amount of ways to transmit a message in a funny, recognizable way.

As already mentioned, linking the dominant trait of a character back to a “funny” trait of the person you are referencing is a great tactic. To maximize the effect, focus on an “irregular” trait. For example, saying someone is as bald as Michael Jordan isn’t nearly as funny as saying someone is as bald as Britney Spears. If the trait you’re targeting is atypical or incongruent to the person (or what they represent), that creates humor.

Additionally, quirky features linked back pop culture are even more effective if flipped in some unexpected way. Examples of “flipping” a metaphor can be as simple as gender or race reversal. So, if you were comparing someone to Tony the Tiger, it’s infinitely funnier to say a butch girl looked like a “female version of Tony the Tiger” (rather than an intense dude). The “in-your-faceness” of Tony the Tiger is funny, but so much funnier if it’s a female.

Moments/emotions

A memorable moment is another great pop culture anchor to drop. Unlike tangible things like people or places, moments and emotions are abstract and slippery. As long as someone is familiar with the moment or emotion referenced, the speaker can contort the metaphor any way he likes.

Considered in that context, pop culture moments and emotions not only provide listeners an insight into our (pop) artistic tastes and preferences, but also tells them how we interpret those moments and emotions.

(More to come)