Laugh Tactics

Last but not least, misdirection is a funny way to express your feelings on something. If you really feel X about a topic, then use misdirection! “Opposite of X, but actually X,” will almost always be received far better than “Gosh, I hate X.”

For example, if you give somebody the compliment “Wow, you are great at navigating,” continue on and give them a title or label, such as “Milwaukee’s very own Magellan,” or “my go-to personal GPS during road trips.”

To be funny, you don’t have to intentionally try. You can use vivid and outlandish imagery to describe what you see and make analogies.

The great comedian Steve Allen used to do this regularly with pop music songs. He would take the most mundane and extremely forgettable piece of some one-hit wonder and recite the lines with extreme solemnity and seriousness. He would make dramatic pauses and then resume with a lot of emotional gravity and pathos in his voice.

If the joke is too generic and people have heard it before, even just the sentiment, people won't find you funny. They might chuckle in slight amusement, but they might develop a negative judgment of your sense of humor because it’s so predictable and generic. They might walk away with a conclusion that you're a fairly generic person with nothing unique to say.

t’s predicated on the fact that when you talk about “appropriate topics,” they usually turn out to be boring and shallow. There are only so many interesting things you can say about work, the weather, grocery shopping, and ice skating. We stay on these topics because we feel like anything more and we are invading people’s privacy and secrets. It’s not true, but it’s a mental barrier we place on ourselves to err on the side of caution, not realizing that the window of appropriateness continues to shrink.

You can laugh at your joke if you can’t keep it in, but don’t be the one that laughs before your audience, or before the punch line. It’s a sign that you’re insecure and you’re not sure other people will laugh as well.

Know Your Emotion

You need to be clear as to the emotion you want to evoke. It has to be articulable, and you have to know it beforehand.

If you don’t have an emotion that you want to evoke from the other person, what are you even talking about, and what is the impact? It’s probably going to be a story or anecdote that ends with people thinking “Oh… you’re done now? That’s the story?”