JokesHow to write a clean joke of your own
The best joke in any group is the one written about that group's own life: its building lift, its canteen tea, its Monday meeting. Nobody has seen it before, and everybody recognises it. You do not need to be a comedian to write one. You need to notice one small true thing and then turn it a little.
Five steps
- Notice something small and shared. Not a big event. A tiny, daily thing that everybody in the group has seen: the OTP that comes late, the uncle who says "five minutes", the printer that fails on the important day. If people would nod at it, it is good raw material.
- Say the plain truth in one line. "The OTP always comes late when I am in a hurry." This is not yet a joke. It is the floor the joke will stand on.
- Find the turn. Ask: what does this remind me of? Who behaves like this? A late OTP behaves like a person who stops for tea on the way. Treating a thing like a person, or a person like a machine, is the commonest turn of all.
- Put the surprise last. Arrange the words so that the turn is the final thing the reader sees. "When the page is about to expire, the OTP stops for tea on the way." If the funny word is in the middle, move it to the end.
- Cut every extra word. Read it aloud. Remove "basically", "you know", "it so happened that". A joke is the shortest story there is.
Three shapes you can borrow
- The definition. Explain an everyday phrase as if to a foreigner. "'A quick call' is office language for forty-five minutes." Try it with "I am on the way", "we will see" or "just one more episode".
- The list of three. Two normal items and one odd one. "The remote is found in three places: father's hand, under the cushion, and 'nobody knows'." The first two set the rhythm; the third breaks it.
- The short conversation. One person asks a sensible question; the other gives an answer that is honest in the wrong way. "Relative: 'What are your plans for the future?' Me: 'Lunch.'"
A worked example
Suppose your housing society's lift is slow. Plain truth: "Our lift takes very long to come." Turn: who else takes long to come? A guest who says "just reaching". Now put the surprise last and cut: "Our society lift and my cousin have the same reply to every call. 'Just reaching.'" It took four small decisions, and it is about your building, so it belongs to your group alone.
Test it for kindness before you post
Ask three questions. Is the joke about a situation, or about a kind of person? Would the person nearest to the subject laugh too? Would I say it with the oldest and the youngest member in the room? If any answer is no, change the target to yourself or to an object. "My uncle is slow" becomes "the lift is slow", and nothing funny is lost. Our seven rules for kind jokes go into this in more detail.
Common mistakes
- Explaining the joke after telling it. If it needs explaining, rewrite it.
- Too many details. The listener does not need the date, the floor number and the colour of the lift.
- Borrowing a famous joke and changing the name. People know it, and it is not yours.
- Using a real name. Even a friendly one can sting in front of forty people.
- Posting five at once. Send your best one. Save the others for other days.
For examples of each shape, read the office jokes, the family jokes and the phone jokes with a writer's eye: find the plain truth under each one, and then the turn.