Humourless booze behemoth, Diageo has countered accusations of taking itself FAR too seriously by focus-grouping it’s own staff to find out ‘what it means to be funny at the expense of the parent company’. Rebecca Grave, head of the Internal Funnies Department at St. James’s Gate said:

“We take fun seriously at Diageo. Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research we first hope to identify the issues that drive our sense of humour in the company, and then the extent to which these themes are embedded across the matrix of our brands and corporate goals.”

Sounds hilarious. 

This reporter was made privy to the target audience profile, which ironically belonged to Diageo employees themselves. It read ‘a Diageo employee is an over-achiever. He or she is good-looking, in a relationship, the envy of family and friends, living in a fashionable area and genuinely worried about accusations of drinking too much’. In short, the Diageo employee is the dictionary definition of a pain in the arse.

In business news, Diageo has confirmed a controlling interest in the production of all Christian Bibles. Diageo’s head of marketing, Lula Bluscht, said: 

“God is very much a role model for this audience and we feel strongly that if God were alive today, he would drink Guinness, Carlsberg and a number of other Diageo products. We have already used focus groups to identify the key cross-over points between religion and alcohol and we hope to brand these and make them more modern and accessible to a cash-rich / time-poor public that is bombarded with cluttered messaging for up to 20 hours a day.”

“It is conceivable that with the right sponsorship package, God may well have opted to change water into Guinness at the Marriage at Cana,” she said. “We want to explore these possibilities with Christian groups and so far they have been very receptive.”

“If you look at the new mystery of faith, for example, you’ll see how the ancient and the modern coalesce perfectly to deliver our key message: Christ has died / Christ is risen / Christ will come again / Christ drinks responsibly / Christ enjoys the pub on a Tuesday. On the face of it, these are ridiculous, nonsensical and frequently contradictory things to say, but we feel the modern audience is well equipped to deal with the paradox and we look forward to their spending a disproportionate amount of their money on our products. Responsibly.”

When asked what the wisdom was in allowing an industry that sells alcohol – the single biggest contributing factor to Ireland’s social and health problems – to regulate itself, Ms. Bluscht replied: “Would you like to meet Bono?”