Q: Why don’t Englishmen tell each other jokes on Saturday night?
A: They’re afraid they might start laughing in church.
When I first read the thread title, I figured it was going to be some variant of “No soap, radio”:
Which it is, sort of.
“No soap, radio” requires three people:
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The person telling the joke;
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A listener who’s in on the joke (and will pretend to laugh at the punchline);
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A listener who’s not in on the joke.
The goal is to get person 3) to be swayed into pretending that they get the (non) joke, and join in laughing at it. Or for 1) and 2) to ridicule 3) for being clueless.
The comedian in the OP is like person 1), but doesn’t have a person 2) participating. So she is trying to sway the audience (person 3)) by herself.
I might have told this here before. When I was younger, I used to live in these apartments that had a pretty fun group of people living there. This one guy, though, was always telling jokes. Corny jokes that he thought hilarious. He was the consummate jokester. The rest of us decided to prank him.
I had gotten home early one day and he told me a joke:
"The boss of a small company has two employees, Jack and Jill…
Recently the company has been doing badly, so the boss decides one of them must go.
The problem was he didn’t know whether to lay Jill or Jack off"
So I proposed to the gang, that in his presence, I would tell the joke wrong and we would all burst out laughing. I told it thusly:
"The boss of a small company has two employees, Jack and Jill…
Recently the company has been doing badly, so the boss decides one of them must go.
The problem was he didn’t know whether to fuck Jill or masturbate"
At the conclusion of my version, right on cue, everyone was laughing like it was the funniest thing they had heard. Jokester said, no wait, here’s how it goes.. and told it the right way and everyone was deadpanned. Someone finally, said, that’s what he said, “… fuck Jill or masturbate”. Again howls of laughter.
He was very perplexed, and just walked out. He must have figured it out because he didn’t talk to us for a week or so.
But that’s a plus! Everyone will say “Hey you look like Elvis!” No one will say “Elvis is DEA.” Or they’ll say “no way the cops have an agent that looks like Elvis. That’s dumb.”
I thought Elvis became an Elvis impersonator.
I once played in a band who got along great, except for one guy, who your guy sounds a lot like. He was both an idiot and a know-it-all, sort of a walking talking case of Dunning-Krueger. He may also have been mildly autistic–he never seemed to know when he’d insulted someone.
We tended to avoid him during breaks, which meant that we were often talking among ourselves. And often, griping about him. So we came up with a counter measure for when he happened upon us. We made up a series of plausible-sounding punchlines for non-existant jokes.
When one of us would spot him approaching, they would yell out (louder than they’d been talking) one of the punchlines, and the rest of us would bust out laughing. To an observer, it would sound like we’d been quietly sharing a risque joke, which had a clean punchline.
Most of the punchlines included a mention of a farmer and/or a traveling salesman. Two that I remember:
“And then the traveling salesman said to the farmer, “Well Pops, that’s never happened to me!””
“And then the farmer said to the traveling salesman, “Not around here they don’t!””