You need to hire an Ed McMahon style sidekick.
I, too, have this problem. My solution: finger guns. Pun, grin, snap, point. For added emphasis, lean backwards while aiming.
This sometimes amuses and sometimes doesn’t, but at least it avoids the whole “people thinking you just said something cataclysmically stupid without a trace of irony” problem, and I have to think it’s at least better than the Fozzie approach.
If your jokes are going over people’s heads, you just need to find friends/colleages with a better sense of humor.
Seriously.
I would have handled it like this:
Luis: “You see the firework show?”
Nick: “Yeah, it was illuminating.”
Luis: “I liked it, too.”
Nick: “Get it? Illuminating?”
Luis: “Nice.”
I make jokes like that quite a bit but they usually involve a reference to sex.
Oh, and I’ll sometimes also go the route of proceeding to explain my joke. More and more explcitly. Usually double entendres. However, I think I usualy only do this when someone has clearly understood the joke the first time.
He needs taller friends.
That’s pretty much what I do with the “Geddit? Geddit?” part. It’s usually followed up by “You sure? I can explain it if you don’t get it. No really, it’s no problem at all. You see, the girl thought that the chicken was actually…”
Two words. Per. Fect.
Ooooh. I’m REALLY good at that!
If his vocabulary were not so small he would have command of more words and be better able to describe it.
I think that after each joke you should say “I just made a joke. Please review.”
A friend of mine makes bad puns like this a lot. Most of the time it’s just a groan, but sometimes he hits it and it can catch you off-guard and be pretty funny. But like someone said above, a lot of punning is hit-or-miss.
This one for example, like the chicken leg one (which I know is just an example), is pretty obvious. Are you sure the people just aren’t saying “uh huh,” to themselves and moving on with the conversation. If people in your circle miss jokes that blatant, there might be no hope. Especially if people actually do need the guy to say “literally” to understand the chicken leg one.
But then again, maybe I’m just missing your humor myself. I don’t really get this last one. Am I missing a meta-level to this and the illuminating joke above? I’m honestly not snarking here, because I do enjoy a good pun. But if these are how I read them, maybe your puns could be more subtle?
You have to choose your audience. Jokes lose a lot in translation.
Like any struggling performer, be it in song, music, film, TV poetry, or comedy, your biggest mistake is not considering your audience.
Here’s a recent example:
Q to me: How do you like marriage?
Depending on my audience, I will decide which joke is best suited for them. As a rule of thumb, jokes are generally divided into: for children, safe for work, not safe for work, or relationship-biased:
For Children: my audience are intellectually stupid and will not understand anything beyond fart jokes, and even half the fart jokes need to be explained. Puns are also here.
Safe for work: jokes do not involve sex or nudity and are generally based on recurring themes in life like marriage, work, traffic, tv shows, etc. Basically, anything you would find on network TV would fit here.
Not safe for work: Jokes that are borderline sexist, racist, or what you would find on South Park.
Relationship-biased: The best jokes are the ones that build on past jokes, or that cater to specific themes that you know that listener particularly enjoys. For example, the president of my company loves toilet jokes.
Therefore, I would tailor the joke to fit my audience. In regards to the above question, my answers would vary:
Q to me: How do you like marriage?
For children: It’s like having a mommy again. In prison.
Safe for work: loudly It’s great! whispering My wallet has a listening device in it. Shhh!
Not safe for work: I thought I was supposed to get a lot of sex, but apparently I’m the one getting fucked.
Relationship-Biased: You remember that time you got in that car accident and you lost your finger, but you got a huge settlement for disfigurement? It’s kind of like that but I have to pay, it’s more painful, and it’s not my finger that’s gone.
Right now though you have the bad reputation of being the “unfunny one.” You have two choices: try to rehabilitate your image, or find new friends that match your humor style. Warning: trying to be the “funny one” takes a ton of effort and can lead to stress disorders. There’s a reason many comedians have drug problems.
If you’ve told a joke, and are looking for a way to indicate to the audience that a joke was just told, you have failed at the first part of that equation. 90% of joke telling is timing. If you’re picking the wrong joke or the wrong time to tell it, it’s no longer a joke - because it’s not funny.
Re: puns. Contrary to the “oh, they just didn’t get it” excuse, 95% of the world understands puns when they’re told. 3% of the world finds them funny. 2.9% of the world are the people that tell those puns. That leaves 0.1% of us who are left chuckling with you. And really, a chuckle is about all you’re going to get - the pun is a really low potential payoff with a pretty high risk of just annoying people.
In the specific examples you gave, I kept reading them in “Canadian”, with the “eh?” at the end.
Q: How did you find the laser light show?
A: It was illuminating, eh?
::Joe conks Sally on the forehead with a half-consumed chicken leg::
Me: Well that was bone-headed, eh?
One of the uses of the Canadian “eh?” is to provide a moment of pause in the conversation where an acknowledgement by the listener(s) is expected, even if it’s just a nod. It’s used a lot for puns and jokes of this sort, IME.
Though whether your audience would accept you acting all Canuck to tell a joke is a whole other issue!
OK, the vocabulary joke was not too bad, but poorly worded (as previously pointed out).
The bonehead and the laser puns? If I had been in that situation - and these puns crossed my mind - I wouldn’t have even verbalized them. They are both very weak.
You have to be more selective with your material, dude. Don’t offer up every lame pun that crosses your mind. Be selective.
mmm
To continue my previous post…
Here is a recent pun of mine that I think illustrates my point:
A group of us were watching a minor league hockey game. One of the goalie’s last name was Yost. I wondered aloud if his dad and his grandfather were present at the game. My friends looked at me, puzzled, and asked ‘why?’
“Because,” I said, "then we’d have
the father, the son and the goalie Yost."
I think there’s a lot to be said for being understatedly funny as well. My boss is the king of this - you can never quite tell if he’s joking. There is less of an immediate payoff, but to have people walk away and say “You have to pay attention with him, he’s really quite funny if you’re listening for it.” is a much more powerful acheivement than just an occasional chortle.
If you must though, look around the group and if anyone makes eye contact, say quietly “You’ll get that on the way home tonight, and laaaaaaaaugh!”
Just don’t get too Tina-Fey-doing-Sarah-Palin with this.
Ai chihuahua, that made me laugh.
Go really OTT.
“Did you see what I did there? Oh. My. God. Did you SEE what I DID there? You thought I was going one way, but I went the other way! My genius is like a diamond bullet through the middle of my forehead.”
ETA: but puns are really what we call “dad jokes”. My brother-in-law - a charming and pleasant man - makes them all the time, and though one a day might be OK, one every couple of minutes and they become tiresome and unfunny.
I’m pretty quick with the clever puns but they frequently unnoticed in groups, and rarely get a big laugh when they are noticed because, as several people have noted, puns are usually not LOL-worthy even if they are clever. My biggest laugh-getters are often not really meant as jokes, just an observation or turn of phrase that is unexpectedly hilarious in the right group.
If I’m in a large group and trying for laughs, the most sure-fire way is to reference a previous topic in the context of the current topic. E.g, if someone mentions they are afraid of spiders, and then a half-hour later the same person says he/she is being audited but isn’t worried about the IRS agent, I would interject “As long as he’s not a spider.” In the group dynamic, this is a sure-fire punchline.