How We Turned Joke-Writing Into Paint-by-Numbers

Can you really turn joke-writing into a repeatable system?

Yes. White Label Comedy began as a comedy agency turning over just £982 in its first year. The breakthrough came from treating jokes like paint-by-numbers: a simple game that let anyone write brand-safe gags from a framework, no natural funny bone required. Within a year of launching it, our turnover had jumped to £226,058. Comedy, it turns out, is a process you can teach.

The year we turned over £982

We launched White Label Comedy in 2018 as an agency powered by TV comedy writers. Like most new businesses, we took a while to get going.

After months of hustling on LinkedIn and sliding into the DMs of anyone who might hire us, we landed our first client, for the princely sum of about £250, which did not come close to covering the cost of the work. Total turnover that year: £982.57. That barely covered the coffees, let alone the writers drinking them.

The idea buried in the footnotes

By 2020 I had a thought. Alongside pitching done-for-you services, what if we taught marketers and business owners to be funny for their own brands?

We wanted a big flagship course, but we had no track record to sell one, and building it properly would have taken so long the company might have folded first. Buried in the notes, though, was a smaller question that got me excited: can you teach joke-writing like paint-by-numbers?

It turned out you could.

What happened when we launched the game

The first edition of Brands Against Mundanity was sold as a game you could play with your team to write brand-safe jokes. The day we launched it was like turning on a tap.

We were making four to five times our ad spend back straight away. But something we did not expect also happened: people who bought the game started booking calls, because they now wanted us to create content for them too. In the first two weeks, two new clients asked us to build sales pages, simply because they had enjoyed reading the one that had just sold them the game.

That year we turned over £226,058, nineteen times the year before.

Why systematising comedy works

Here is the lesson that has stuck with me. Funny is not a lightning strike that only a lucky few can summon. It is a craft you can break into repeatable parts: patterns, structures and frameworks that reliably produce a laugh when you drop your own specifics in.

Turn comedy into a process and it stops depending on inspiration. That means you can do it on demand, at volume, for any business, which is exactly what a small team needs when it cannot afford to wait for a muse.

Meet Brian

That original paint-by-numbers idea is exactly what Brian, our AI Comedy Marketing Machine, is built on.

Brian runs on the same frameworks we have refined across years of client work, so instead of waiting for inspiration you start from a structure that already works and fill in your specifics.

Take Brian for a spin and write funny on purpose, not by luck.