An ACTUAL guide to making obvious jokes
Jan. 22nd, 2010 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackFormatting of my last (but two) post
In a twist so ironic it's almost literally painful, I screwed up the formatting on my "how to make obvious jokes" post, and no-one mentioned it. I don't know if that's because everyone thought they couldn't comment without making an obvious joke, falling foul of Somebody's Law, or if they assumed I'd done it deliberately to _bait_ someone into making an obvious joke, or they just didn't think it mattered. But anyway, thank you for not making a big deal :)
(In fact, the fault was in using Windows Notepad to store the text, which while convenient in many ways [sic] can't decide between wrapping text and not wrapping text, so makes sure that it fucks up the formatting whichever you try to do by randomly switching between. Yes, Notepad carefully eschews all richer sorts of formatting, so it's guaranteed not to screw up your fonts, etc, except by taking them away, so it has to resort to screwing up your line breaks if it wants to mess up, but it does that with panache.)
An ACTUAL guide to making obvious jokes
At least one loyal reader expressed joking displeasure with my last post. "It was funny", she might have said. "But it was more about how to deliver obvious jokes, rather than how to make up obvious jokes, which was what I expected."
Well, ok, let me consider that. That's not necessarily useless. Obvious jokes can perform a useful social function: letting ones guard down can be a form of intimacy, a small gesture of trust indicating that the level of formality is not at the maximum, and that you're happy to enjoy each others company[1] as equals, at least a little bit, even if you're, say, negotiating a corporate merger[2].
Also, it means that if someone genuinely doesn't understand obvious humour, and is always thinking "No, actually, I'm wet because it's raining. Hadn't you noticed?" in response, possibly this would help.
I don't suppose it'll be at all comprehensive, or even useful, but let me try. I'm making this up as I go along.
Type I
The most obvious place for obvious humour is to wait until something, however small, differs from usual. Then you feel embarrassed to comment directly on it: "I see its raining" because that's such an obvious comment it doesn't add anything. So, instead, you take the most obvious misinterpretation of what you saw, and pretend you thought that was true. This leads to classic "jokes" such as:
* "Susie, you look different" when John comes in when you usually expect Susie
* "Oh, did you just have a shower with your clothes on?"
* "Wow! What did YOU do to your BARBER?" when someone comes in with a dramatic haircut and either: (a) it looks good, but you want to indicate that indirectly by pretending it looks bad, something you would only do if it OBVIOUSLY looks good; or (b) you know them well enough to tease them; or (c) you're behind a wall.
[1] Pun. Honest.
[2] See? :)
Type II
Vocalising shared prejudice. Everyone there hates George Bush. Or non-WASP people. Or Microshoft. Or whatever. There's little to be gained by saying it AGAIN, but it reinforces everyone's ideas, and if you don't know for sure that everyone agrees with your opinion, making a joke instead of a direct criticism (a) makes it marginally easier to brush off if someone disagrees, and (b) releaves you of the responsibility of justifying your prejudice.
Once you've identified a shared prejudice, the "jokes" can be really obvious. Basically, wait until someone mentions (a) the topic or (b) what you think of the topic or (c) the opposite of what you think of the topic or (d) something very very tangentially related to the topic. Then "humorously" connect the two. For instance:
A: So, I tried runnning Windows Vista and--
B: And it was a mistake?
A: Wow, this coffee really sucks.
B: Oh. Must have been made by Microsoft then!
A: Wow, this program works really well!
B: Obviously not made by Microsoft!
A: My neighbour was nearly mugged last week.
B: He should think himself lucky Bush wasn't still president at the time!
Of course, just because it's obvious, doesn't mean that it's not funny, and doesn't always mean it would be obvious in advance. Lots of the best ideas, in comedy and outside, seem obvious in retrospect, and much really funny humour is of a similar technique to the formulaic recipies I'm trying to describe hear, but done a lot better, typically coming at you out of the blue, and preferably with style and delivery.
Type III
Exagarating something about someone who you want to make fun of. This can be made to work however irrelevant it is. For instance, I remind you of the second example of type II.
A: Wow, this coffee really sucks.
B: Oh. Must have been made by Microsoft then!
I could have made it much more harsh to B by appending to it:
A: Wow, this coffee really sucks.
B: Oh. Must have been made by Microsoft then! Ha ha!
B thought their comment was funny. So I made fun of B by pretending they thought their comment was REALLY REALLY funny, so funny they'd be stupid to think it was that funny.
Suppose someone at work wears a hat, and no-one else does. Regardless of whether you like the hat or not (people at work like my hat), you can mock it pretty much automatically.
A: I'm going out to Tesco's.
B: Oh, don't forget to take your hat!
A: Sorry I'm a bit late.
B: Oh, did you lose your hat?
A: I started a website.
B: Does it sell hats?
After a little while, it becomes a running joke, and then justifies its own existence. Sometimes, within a social group, this sort of teasing can be a very good bonding experience. Sometimes, it just comes off more as "Hey, look at the self-conscious guy! Let's all hammar at his weak point until he cries!" The trick is to have a good algorithm to pick something a little incongruous, but not so incongruous anyone would ACTUALLY feel bad about it. For instance, a hat is a good choice, because you can PRETEND the hat is very important. If you're teasing someone that, say, their ugly and getting fired, you need to know them a lot better to know they won't take it seriously. A common mistake is to have the algorithm be "assume everyone is the same as me".
If you try hard enough, you can even make fun of someone for being competent and enthusiastic -- occasionally politcal cartoonists and so on have to resort to this. (Ideally they make it funny too.)
Type IV
If you really can't think of humor even this basic, but still want to, you can repeat jokes you've heard elsewhere. It's funny, but mathematicians go on finding the Zorn's Lemon joke funny. Most of the time it wasn't funny the first time because they heard it so young they had to look up what Zorn's Lemma was. But now it's a sign of group membership. Simply mentioning Zorn's Lemon gets you cool points. (Admittedly from someone who may have very few to give.)
Type V
If you're really desperate for obvious humour, use puns. A convenient template can be easily generalised from Christmas Crackers[1]. Find two words that sound alike, X and Y, and without loss of generality, consider a property P[2], true of Y but not X.
Then recite the standard formula:
A: I say, I say, what do you call an X that is P?
B: I don't know, what do you call an X that is P?
A: Y!
If they don't laugh, you may have to say "Ba-boom Tschchhh!" afterwards.
Of course, you can use different themes. If P is mildy or humiliatingly embarrassing and X is desireable, you can use the "deaf genie" pattern.
You'll see, by using metasyntactic variables X and Y in place of the key parts of the joke, I ironically mocked quite a good joke by using Type III and implying the joke is much less original than it is. Obviously, most people have heard it before, but it's set up quite well, enough story to keep going, but odd enough to make the beginning a little funny too, and cleverly never actually says the first X, which makes it seem much less obvious than it is by making you fill that in yourself by mentally automatically filling in "What's like Y, but desirable instead of mildly silly"?
Honestly, there are pages and pages of these jokes: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=genie+jokes
[1] Look for the joke, not the general knowledge fact. "I say, I say, I say, who was the first man to walk on the moon? Neil Armstrong!" can be funny, but probably not in the same way you intended. If you repeat it, it does quickly become obvious humour though. (I do this.)
[2] Mathematicians may use a predicate. They have the same first letter.
In a twist so ironic it's almost literally painful, I screwed up the formatting on my "how to make obvious jokes" post, and no-one mentioned it. I don't know if that's because everyone thought they couldn't comment without making an obvious joke, falling foul of Somebody's Law, or if they assumed I'd done it deliberately to _bait_ someone into making an obvious joke, or they just didn't think it mattered. But anyway, thank you for not making a big deal :)
(In fact, the fault was in using Windows Notepad to store the text, which while convenient in many ways [sic] can't decide between wrapping text and not wrapping text, so makes sure that it fucks up the formatting whichever you try to do by randomly switching between. Yes, Notepad carefully eschews all richer sorts of formatting, so it's guaranteed not to screw up your fonts, etc, except by taking them away, so it has to resort to screwing up your line breaks if it wants to mess up, but it does that with panache.)
An ACTUAL guide to making obvious jokes
At least one loyal reader expressed joking displeasure with my last post. "It was funny", she might have said. "But it was more about how to deliver obvious jokes, rather than how to make up obvious jokes, which was what I expected."
Well, ok, let me consider that. That's not necessarily useless. Obvious jokes can perform a useful social function: letting ones guard down can be a form of intimacy, a small gesture of trust indicating that the level of formality is not at the maximum, and that you're happy to enjoy each others company[1] as equals, at least a little bit, even if you're, say, negotiating a corporate merger[2].
Also, it means that if someone genuinely doesn't understand obvious humour, and is always thinking "No, actually, I'm wet because it's raining. Hadn't you noticed?" in response, possibly this would help.
I don't suppose it'll be at all comprehensive, or even useful, but let me try. I'm making this up as I go along.
Type I
The most obvious place for obvious humour is to wait until something, however small, differs from usual. Then you feel embarrassed to comment directly on it: "I see its raining" because that's such an obvious comment it doesn't add anything. So, instead, you take the most obvious misinterpretation of what you saw, and pretend you thought that was true. This leads to classic "jokes" such as:
* "Susie, you look different" when John comes in when you usually expect Susie
* "Oh, did you just have a shower with your clothes on?"
* "Wow! What did YOU do to your BARBER?" when someone comes in with a dramatic haircut and either: (a) it looks good, but you want to indicate that indirectly by pretending it looks bad, something you would only do if it OBVIOUSLY looks good; or (b) you know them well enough to tease them; or (c) you're behind a wall.
[1] Pun. Honest.
[2] See? :)
Type II
Vocalising shared prejudice. Everyone there hates George Bush. Or non-WASP people. Or Microshoft. Or whatever. There's little to be gained by saying it AGAIN, but it reinforces everyone's ideas, and if you don't know for sure that everyone agrees with your opinion, making a joke instead of a direct criticism (a) makes it marginally easier to brush off if someone disagrees, and (b) releaves you of the responsibility of justifying your prejudice.
Once you've identified a shared prejudice, the "jokes" can be really obvious. Basically, wait until someone mentions (a) the topic or (b) what you think of the topic or (c) the opposite of what you think of the topic or (d) something very very tangentially related to the topic. Then "humorously" connect the two. For instance:
A: So, I tried runnning Windows Vista and--
B: And it was a mistake?
A: Wow, this coffee really sucks.
B: Oh. Must have been made by Microsoft then!
A: Wow, this program works really well!
B: Obviously not made by Microsoft!
A: My neighbour was nearly mugged last week.
B: He should think himself lucky Bush wasn't still president at the time!
Of course, just because it's obvious, doesn't mean that it's not funny, and doesn't always mean it would be obvious in advance. Lots of the best ideas, in comedy and outside, seem obvious in retrospect, and much really funny humour is of a similar technique to the formulaic recipies I'm trying to describe hear, but done a lot better, typically coming at you out of the blue, and preferably with style and delivery.
Type III
Exagarating something about someone who you want to make fun of. This can be made to work however irrelevant it is. For instance, I remind you of the second example of type II.
A: Wow, this coffee really sucks.
B: Oh. Must have been made by Microsoft then!
I could have made it much more harsh to B by appending to it:
A: Wow, this coffee really sucks.
B: Oh. Must have been made by Microsoft then! Ha ha!
B thought their comment was funny. So I made fun of B by pretending they thought their comment was REALLY REALLY funny, so funny they'd be stupid to think it was that funny.
Suppose someone at work wears a hat, and no-one else does. Regardless of whether you like the hat or not (people at work like my hat), you can mock it pretty much automatically.
A: I'm going out to Tesco's.
B: Oh, don't forget to take your hat!
A: Sorry I'm a bit late.
B: Oh, did you lose your hat?
A: I started a website.
B: Does it sell hats?
After a little while, it becomes a running joke, and then justifies its own existence. Sometimes, within a social group, this sort of teasing can be a very good bonding experience. Sometimes, it just comes off more as "Hey, look at the self-conscious guy! Let's all hammar at his weak point until he cries!" The trick is to have a good algorithm to pick something a little incongruous, but not so incongruous anyone would ACTUALLY feel bad about it. For instance, a hat is a good choice, because you can PRETEND the hat is very important. If you're teasing someone that, say, their ugly and getting fired, you need to know them a lot better to know they won't take it seriously. A common mistake is to have the algorithm be "assume everyone is the same as me".
If you try hard enough, you can even make fun of someone for being competent and enthusiastic -- occasionally politcal cartoonists and so on have to resort to this. (Ideally they make it funny too.)
Type IV
If you really can't think of humor even this basic, but still want to, you can repeat jokes you've heard elsewhere. It's funny, but mathematicians go on finding the Zorn's Lemon joke funny. Most of the time it wasn't funny the first time because they heard it so young they had to look up what Zorn's Lemma was. But now it's a sign of group membership. Simply mentioning Zorn's Lemon gets you cool points. (Admittedly from someone who may have very few to give.)
Type V
If you're really desperate for obvious humour, use puns. A convenient template can be easily generalised from Christmas Crackers[1]. Find two words that sound alike, X and Y, and without loss of generality, consider a property P[2], true of Y but not X.
Then recite the standard formula:
A: I say, I say, what do you call an X that is P?
B: I don't know, what do you call an X that is P?
A: Y!
If they don't laugh, you may have to say "Ba-boom Tschchhh!" afterwards.
Of course, you can use different themes. If P is mildy or humiliatingly embarrassing and X is desireable, you can use the "deaf genie" pattern.
A guy walks into a tavern. As he walked up to the bar he noticed a Y, so he asked the bartender, "What's that all about?"
The bartender told him he that would tell him later. So the guy asked the bartender for a drink. The bartender said, "Before you get your drink, you get to rub the magic beer bottle and make one wish."
"Okay," said the guy. He went over to the magic beer bottle and rubbed it. Poof. Out came a genie. The genie, of course, said, "You have one wish."
The guy thought about it and then wished for X'. A cloud of smoke filled the room, and then both the genie and the guy disappeared. In a few minutes, the guy reappeared back in the bar with Y'
The guy was astounded and said to the bartender, "Hey! I didn't want Y'" The bartender replied, "Do you think I wanted Y?"
You'll see, by using metasyntactic variables X and Y in place of the key parts of the joke, I ironically mocked quite a good joke by using Type III and implying the joke is much less original than it is. Obviously, most people have heard it before, but it's set up quite well, enough story to keep going, but odd enough to make the beginning a little funny too, and cleverly never actually says the first X, which makes it seem much less obvious than it is by making you fill that in yourself by mentally automatically filling in "What's like Y, but desirable instead of mildly silly"?
Honestly, there are pages and pages of these jokes: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=genie+jokes
[1] Look for the joke, not the general knowledge fact. "I say, I say, I say, who was the first man to walk on the moon? Neil Armstrong!" can be funny, but probably not in the same way you intended. If you repeat it, it does quickly become obvious humour though. (I do this.)
[2] Mathematicians may use a predicate. They have the same first letter.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 06:52 pm (UTC)I think I assumed that notifying you by LJ comment wasn't likely to cause you to look at LJ any sooner. On reflection it might perfectly well have done (it would do for me, typically).
no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 11:37 pm (UTC)I'm never sure what to desire about corrections. On the one hand, if there's an annoying error, I would rather it were pointed out so I can fix it. OTOH, almost any WAY of pointing it out always seems unnecessarily nitpicky.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-23 01:40 am (UTC)YES.
SO TRUE.
*cough* not that I've been annoyed at people reasonably for using, as a general algorithm for life, "assume everyone is the same as me" ... not at all. (Well, not seriously, just enough for it to be irritating. Once is naive and cute. Twice is a funny look. Repeat ad infinitum and you want to know why they haven't picked up on the real world yet.)
I'm finding shared prejudices irritating at the moment but I think that's more a phase I'm going through (of being jaded at mathmo-ness or of being annoyed when people genuinely don't question reasoning behind the prejudices) than anything else.
--Carol
no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 02:13 am (UTC)Joining intellectual societies like Cambridge geeks, I have noticed that they are often very liberal and accepting of all sorts of things -- but display the same sorts of objectionable behaviour towards people they don't get on with as every other group does, at least some of the time. I can see _myself_ doing it: I mock someone stupid, and then say "hang on, I'm doing something that would be so unhelpful if someone else did it, but because it's aimed at chavs/christians/non-intellectuals/someone-else-not-in-cambridge-geek-in-group it's suddenly ok? it's not". I hope it's _less_ common, but it's far, far from having no prejudice.