Five Rules for telling a Joke
By Paul
- Pick your moments. It's easiest to tell a joke when everyone's relaxed and enjoying themselves. Telling a joke to relieve tension is a high-risk strategy, but potentially hilarious. Besides, there'll be other funerals.
- Know where you're going - the punchline - before you start
- Don't be tempted to over-elaborate. Eddie Izzard makes it look easy, but remember that one man's surreal flight of fancy is another man's rambling, incoherent humiliation.
- Project a demeanour of relaxed confidence - it gives your listener permission to laugh. You can try deadpan, but social joke-telling usually requires the teller to laugh too.
- Enjoy it. If your entire self-esteem is resting on whether people laugh at your joke, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, you are showing signs of the borderline personality disorder that characterises all the best comedians, so perhaps you should consider telling jokes for a living.
Via Mind Hacks- How to be funny
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The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes by Jimmy Carr, Lucy Greeves