do you guys actually tell formal jokes?
by
mrz » Fri May 29, 2015 12:49 pm
Like, with a story line, or knock knock, things like that? That is really awkward humor to my perception, like it's funny or potentially funny if it is being done explicitly to entertain me, but it really doesn't usually mesh with socializing at all. Although rarely people will kind of tell a more formal joke like this, the vast majority of social humor is really fluid and contextual, it modulates the current banter rather than introducing an entirely new topic.
If you're trying to tell story lines, or memorized material, or anything like that, even if it is in isolation funny, it's really unlikely to be funny just injected into a social setting. I just mention this because I've seen numerous people talking about telling jokes or memorizing joke books to repeat the material etc, and that just seems really awkward to me.
Usually people I know anyway tend to stick to kind of four different types of humor that immediately come to mind.
Puns are pretty common where you make a play on words, this isn't something you really memorize ahead of time you just need to kind of notice the multiple possible interpretations of something and highlight the one that is less likely to be automatically perceived, especially if it is kind of making it seem like someone said something the opposite of what they meant. Alternatively you can kind of invent such a play on words to inject into the current situation somehow.
Sarcasm is pretty popular too and one of my favorite types of humor, like you will not read a book and learn all kinds of possible cases where you can use sarcasm to be able to verbatim copy them, you really just need to kind of learn the theory behind it or naturally understand it and know when to use it.
Absurdity is another type, where something in the current situation is framed in a way that makes it seem kind of ridiculous or out of the ordinary, or like something ridiculous is applied to it. Like once for example I was with a few people and we had a few doses of a drug but not enough for everyone, and I said too bad Jesus isn't here, nothing particularly funny but just an example of a kind of absurd reinterpretation of the current context.
Hyperbole is pretty popular too, and is usually mixed with absurdity or is just absurd in the extent it goes to. It's kind of like sarcasm actually but without a tell I guess you could say, the tell is just the egregious extent of the verbal information rather than contradictory tone of voice / facial expression / whatever mixed with it.
I'd stick to learning how to kind of modulate the current situation with these techniques, and less on memorizing jokes, memorizing jokes and telling them is a very aspie sense of humor and rarely is what you want to go for.
