In the summer of 2021, Sean McBride, creative chief at Arnold Worldwide, got serious about adding a diverse group of funny people to his staff. He launched the Institute for the Comedically Gifted, a three-month program designed to entice folks with serious comedy chops to the Boston-based agency.

“For a bunch of years, I’ve struggled to find funny creatives, as ad schools and other agencies seemed to care less and less about making funny work,” McBride tells Muse. “At the same time, over the last few years, Arnold has really been pushing itself to diversify our team, but traditional channels were only getting us so far. So, at a certain point it occurred to me that maybe we were trying to solve the same talent problem on two parallel paths, and the solution to both was to combine those paths. That’s how the idea was born.”

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