How (Not) to Be Funny

Bad jokes, social anxiety, and human evolution

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today’s question comes from R.L. in Massachusetts, who wants to know:

What tips or insights can you share to help someone, like me or [names of teenage children redacted], be funnier in social situations? 

I have good news and bad news for you, R.L.

The bad news is that when it comes to being funnier, just asking this question has probably placed you beyond human aid. 

I’m arguably funny, enough so that I financed my kids’ college educations by monetizing poop jokes.

There’s a poop joke in this script that’s eight pages long. I wish I was exaggerating

But even after thirty years of writing them, I still don’t really know how a joke works. Back when I was working for him in the 1990’s, Al Franken once told me that comedy is math.

Which I kind of understand? I guess? But not well enough to explain it to others.

And if you can’t explain something, it seems impossible to teach it.

I’m not sure you can even analyze comedy without doing serious damage to whatever made it funny in the first place. For example, here’s an Adam Gopnik New Yorker article about humor that’s about as amusing as a mouthful of sand.

And this ode to Jim Gaffigan’s standup routine about Hot Pockets just made me feel bad for everyone involved, including both Jim Gaffigan and whoever invented Hot Pockets.

Please don’t click on those links. I only included them so it looks like I did some research. 

Even more importantly—in fact, it’s so important that I’m going to put it in big type—

Trying to be funny in social situations is very risky.

If you fail—which I’ve done a lot—you’ll look and feel much, much worse than if you’d never even made the attempt. Sci-fi author John Scalzi’s essay on “The Failure State of Clever” gets at more or less this same idea, and might actually be worth clicking on.

So that’s the bad news: if you have to ask how to be funny, you probably shouldn’t even be trying.

But here’s the good news! 

I think I know what the problem behind your problem is, and it’s totally solvable. 

When you say “in social situations,” I suspect you mean public or semi-public ones—job-related gatherings, school functions, that kind of thing—where you’re interacting with people you don’t know well, if at all. Unlike a gathering with your family or close friends, who love and accept you whether you’re funny or not, your status in these larger, less intimate groups is uncertain. 

That’s scary for you. Or at least uncomfortable. This feeling of social anxiety is pretty much universal, and for good evolutionary reasons. Human beings are social animals, but tribal ones: our brains evolved to live in small groups of a few dozen people, among whom we spent our entire lives. Nobody went on corporate retreats or attended elementary school curriculum nights, so we didn’t have to worry about making awkward small talk.

On the rare occasions when we encountered strangers, the stakes were often existential: is this person going to bludgeon me to death? Should I bludgeon them first?

Deep down in your lizard brain, you don’t actually care whether or not you’re funny. You just don’t want to get murdered.

So here’s my advice: when you or your apparently unfunny kids enter a social situation, bring a weapon. A small-caliber handgun that fits in a purse or back pocket is an excellent choice, although since you live in Massachusetts, you’ll need a license for concealed carry.

A simpler option—and a more elegant one, especially if you’re in semi-formal or formal attire—would be one of those folding butterfly knives that the kids in my high school used to flash in the locker room after gym class. 

Trust me when I say those kids showed no signs of social anxiety.

And once you’re appropriately armed, neither will you! Easy access to lethal force at gatherings both large and small will give you the sort of quiet confidence that even the most laugh-out-loud funny guest struggles to achieve.

Thanks for your interest in my bad advice! Please feel free to share it with others. And keep the questions coming! I can’t do this without them.