Hey y’all, it’s Blogvent, day 18, where I blog daily in December! I admit this one took a while for me to write because work was so busy today (we had some big announcements, you can look it up, I’m too lazy to link here), and I didn’t really have a plan going into it. But words burst forth anyway! Let’s go.

One of the things that has come up a few times at work and on socials and stuff is how I come up with jokes or how I… “became funny”. I am always amused and taken aback by those questions (and also honored that someone thinks I’m funny), because it usually comes from developers who really want a specific formula to follow, and… humor is subjective.

But generally, here is how I approach being objectively downright hilarious to all people.

Opportunities

Every single moment in life is an opportunity for:

• A pun
• A rhyme
• A one-liner

Your puns and rhymes and one-liners (your PROs) don’t have to be good. They don’t have to make sense. But they have to be executed consistently. Repetition is recognition!

When people start to get used to your PROs, because they’re consistently executed, they start to expect them. When they start to expect them, they feel “in” on the joke. When they feel “in” on the joke, they both feel included AND think you’re extra funny because they “got it”. People love feeling like they are in on an inside joke, even if it isn’t one. That’s why memes are such a thing, because people who “get it” are in on it, on a broader scale!

Repeating something → Recognition of the joke → Reliable laughs

I’ll give you one example: one of my favorite one-liners that I love to use with folks is, “that was my nickname in high school.”

If someone says, “oh, this code is boring but clean,” I can easily say, “that was my nickname in high school.” If someone says, “oh no, the balloon is deflated,” blammo, nickname in high school. If someone says, “the gorgeous, funny, strong woman is here,” you know what I’m gonna say.

If you’re prepared with some one-liners, and think about how a sentence might be a pun or a rhyme, you can practice being “quick” with your wit and comebacks.

High-level tips

• Write down everything. Humor comes at unexpected times in unexpected places. Sometimes a joke might sit in your notepad for years, but when its moment comes, it will be beautiful. Here’s some of my dumb jokes I’ve partially written with this tip in mind!
• Surprises/twists in existing phrases/concepts/clichés. Surprises undermine expectations, and a person startled by that laughs often! Fart!
• Save humor for the end of a sentence or phrase. Humor is often a release of tension, so leading up to a joke makes for a better payoff.
• Use contrast. Contrasting the serious and ridiculous is fun. A very techy example of this is the fact that we can laugh at developers tweaking tiny little margins of a page, when all of their tests are failing on their second monitor.
• Use “sherbet lemons” and funny words. These are fun little words and small details you throw in text to make people smile! Here’s an example blog post of mine that is basically powered entirely by silliness in between code samples.
• The rule of three. This is a common one you’ll see all over anything comical. I literally used it in this post already. This is where you establish a narrative with two concepts, and a twist with a third at the end. For example: “can I help you work anything? The CSS, that JavaScript, your bad attitude?”

Everyone is funny.

Even the most serious people can be funny, it all just depends on how you convey it. The things I’ve talked about in here today are definitely my definition of humor, and yours probably vary from mine.

BUT what you have to do overall is: practice what you’re comfortable with, stretch yourself humor-wise with experimental jokes (even if it’s just with a friend or two), and don’t suck. Hey, rule of three!