Five Common Mistakes People Make When Telling Jokes
When it comes to humor, no one is perfect. Some people just manage to spot a bad joke right away and shut up or gracefully remove their awkward jokes. Here are some common mistakes you can make when it comes to jokes and how to recognize and avoid them.
You used the wrong old jokes
There is a grain of truth in every cliché – which is why they have managed to stay for so long. Likewise, old jokes can be good because they have something classically funny about them. They can be consistent, but they must be used with care. Find out how the classic anecdote differs from the “shellfish”.
Writer David Blum explains in The New York Times : “Comedic clams are jokes that you hear too often and make you moan rather than laugh.”
Some of the jokes are so good that you can tweak them a bit and they’ll be relevant again. There is a reason why they are stuck. But many of the old jokes are simply out of date. (“[Insert complimentary phrase] … NOT” and “awkward.” They were once funny come to mind!) Everything has its own life cycle.
Know which jokes are relevant and which are not. If you’ve recently seen it on TV, it will likely expire in a few weeks or months. Pay close attention to which jokes cause laughter and which ones cause painful grimaces or puzzled looks. Observe other people in the group and learn from their mistakes.
You haven’t developed the idea enough
Usually something sounds better in your head than when you actually say it out loud. A refined idea is more likely to make people laugh (or at least not make them cringe) than a crude idea. But before you speak, ask yourself:
- Can you briefly explain this?
- Will the people you talk to like?
- Is the time right?
Sometimes your joke or funny thought takes too many mental steps. You may need to set it up correctly to explain correctly, which can take too long or cause people to lose interest. Alternatively, it can simply fly over people’s heads. On a note like this, you might notice something funny, but you have not yet figured out how to best represent or articulate it. This is fine. Shut up and let the pickle. You may have one more chance later, and needless to say now that it will collapse.
You are speaking to the wrong audience
A funny message concerns the people who receive it, as well as the person who delivers it. You can play a trick on the accounting department and they will probably laugh (or at least laugh – after moaning, as it probably was), but the same pun will confuse people unfamiliar with accounting. They just have different contexts to understand it.
The wrong audience can cause some of the most volatile or noteworthy mistakes. A joke or funny observation can step on someone’s foot because it involves a sensitive issue that you didn’t know about.
Your humor won’t resonate with everyone, and that’s okay. As you learn more about your audience, you will be able to adapt to it with minor changes. As one stand-up comedian said , “I should have been more empathetic to the audience — perhaps avoiding the material altogether — but at least tweaking it. And in my next gig, I tweaked it before going on stage elsewhere. club and it was much better. “
You haven’t sharpened enough
Putting together related anecdotes can be fun. However, it can also seem repetitive if you are not building on a previous joke enough. Whether the joke was yours or someone else’s, you can expand on the previous joke by exaggerating it or remembering the extreme opposite. Emphasize the extreme or absurdity of the joke. Few things are less funny than a repetitive joke, especially if they’ve been separated by a short amount of time.
If you find that you’ve gone too far or your joke is out of control, you can bring it back. Just revisit the It Quickly Aggravated Meme to save you or someone else from abusing a joke too much. (Wow, I probably couldn’t have made this sentence more meaningless. Besides, the phrase “It escalated quickly” is not a joke for all viewers.)
You stuck to the script and didn’t adapt
Getting new information – about how someone is feeling, what makes them laugh, what they like – and responding to it is critical to being funny. Comedian Keegan-Michael Key describes this responsiveness as a key ingredient in making people laugh in this New Yorker interview :
You have to be able to guess what many people really think, even if they never dare to say it. It is this skill, after all, that is the bread and butter of every comic. How to develop it? Key, who has given a lot of thought to this issue, feels that both his empathy and his imitation skills are, in fact, a form of hypersensitivity. “The theory is this: there is no one in the world – there may be people who are as well versed in this as I am, but no one knows how to adapt to the situation better than me.”
You can use a script to tell a joke well, but you always have the option to swerve. If you admit one of these mistakes early on, just let the joke die. Better yet, kill him yourself. A quick “Wow, you know what? It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t sound as funny as I say it out loud, “either grab someone’s attention or pique their curiosity (so you buy a little more time to set the joke), or let you drop the joke early so avoid embarrassment.
Hopefully, if you take a close look at these anti-patterns, it will save you some unpleasant moments. Be careful with old jokes and tweak them a bit. Make sure your ideas are fully developed and delivered to the right audience. Sharpen your jokes if you intend to continue. Don’t stick to a script or routine – adapt to the situation as it develops.