Sometimes I crack myself up but don’t crack anybody else up.
Examples.
Me: Argh! My husband’s mother-in-law is visiting and she is driving me nuts!
Coworker (bemused): Your…husband’s mother-in-law? Isn’t that…your mother?
Me: Haha. Yes!
Coworker shakes head and walks off.
Me: Oh no it’s cloudy. That means my solar clothes dryer won’t work so well.
Coworker: Wow, you have a solar-powered clothes dryer?
Me: Yes. Otherwise known as a clothesline.
Coworker shakes head and walks off.
Coworker and I walk out of a meeting where there are cookies. I have a cookie but it’s not a very good cookie and I’m done with it. I stub it out in an ashtray by the elevator. (Note: smoking no longer allowed in building but for some reason there are still ashtrays by the elevator. )
We get on the elevator and I realize what I just did, i.e., I just put my cookie out in the ashtray, so I laugh. Coworker asks what’s funny. I tell her.
She doesn’t get it until two hours later and comes to tell me it was pretty funny once she got it. The joke being that of course you don’t have to stub a cookie out in an ashtray, you can just toss it in the ashtray, but since it was an ashtray I went ahead and ground it in, out of habit…ah, the hell with it.
I’m one of those people!
Sarcasm I do get, but I don’t find it funny. I force myself to give a polite “heh heh”, just to avoid seeming stupid.
What I don’t get at all is irony. I just can’t detect it, and the whole concept baffles and annoys me. It goes so far that I distrust people who use irony a lot, because they seem dishonest to me.
Ghetto edit:
In my case, it’s not even a cultural thing. Irony and sarcasm are something like a national pastime in my country. I can sympathise with our German neighbours who see my countrymen as two-faced.
I’ve worked in many places where the first one would have gotten a response along the lines of “you know, I’m not even married and sometimes I can’t stand my wife’s mother-in-law either” and the second one would have been understood straightaway. After a conversation in which a certain coworker took it for granted that everybody would have a dryer (note that this was in a place with average yearly temps in the high 20 Cs/80 Fs, and about 20 rainy days per year), another one’s reply of “mine is fusion-powered” led to the team talking about how “the fusion dryer isn’t working very well today” to indicate “it’s cloudy”.
There was a Spanish standup comedian who would turn his microphone around whenever a deadpanned joke led to expectant silence. After one too many times of falling for my father’s deadpan style, Mom asked him to “turn the mike”; sometimes when he said something outrageous in a completely deadpan way she’d ask “did you turn the microphone around?”, others he’d do it straightaway.
In this case I suspect it was completely a cultural/individual thing. The nurse, whom I had been cutting up with previously, indicated that Dr. Sleepmiester had virtually no sense of humor.
You think you’re saying “I’m being funny!” To me it sounds like “Please look at me.”
I’m the type to laugh politely, but in my office, that validation will result in 30 more minutes of riffing. So I sit there wearing the psychological equivalent of a sniper ghillie suit so as to appear completely inattentive and humorless (giant headphones, flatscreen angled just so, stone-dead face with stone-dead eyes).
What would have REALLY been funny would be if he took your statement at face value and started opening up your chest without painkillers. And then you’d have said “I’m joking!” And he could have said “Me too! It’s a real rib-splitter! I just love a patient with a good sense of humor.”
As numerous as humour impaired persons may be, this thread makes me believe those numbers are fully equalled by those who are NOT funny but believe themselves to be an absolute laugh riot.
(Sometimes it’s not that your audience is humour impaired. Often you’re not so funny as you think. To laugh at your lame jokes will only encourage you. Hence straight faces all around.)
It’s not that we don’t get it, it’s that we don’t find it funny.
I would add, in many situations, especially with strangers, the context of “joking” has to be established, and you as a “funny person” has to be established. This is most true with sarcasm and dry humor or irony. A funny statement made with a chuckle helps set the tone that humor is happening. Then you can work up to the more complex stuff.
There’s nothing more embarrassing than laughing at someone’s deadpan humor when they are being 100% serious. I could see a doctor intentionally turning their humor detector off just to prevent this from happening.
Recently I was warning someone about my facial tics, and he busted out laughing. I’m assuming he thought I was being funny (Tourette’s is frequently the butt of jokes). But I didn’t correct him because awkward. I know it will come up again, so I know he’ll eventually realize I was being serious.
That’s exactly what I do - I float a trial balloon, as it were, to see if these people are on my wavelength, and if not, I won’t bust out my driest, most sarcastic wit.
:dubious:
That’s one hell of an ISP you’ve got there, buddy.
I was working at Target doing remote admin on store computers. One needed to be rebooted, so I called the store.
Me: Hi, this is [me] from Headquarters.
Team Relations Leader: Headquarters? What is it?
Me: It’s a big building with a lot of computers, but that’s not important right now.
TRL: …
Me: …
TRL: So, what did you need?
My dad had a very deadpan sense of humor. He would say things completely straight-faced, and I would crack up because funny. My sister, less than two years younger than me, would take him completely seriously. We had the same context, but she … just didn’t get it.
I would have gotten it.
But then, I was clearly the oldest person in the theater the day I watched Scary Movie 3 (I think it was 3). I was, literally, the only person in the theater who laughed out loud when Leslie Nielson stuck his head into the barn and told the two main characters, “I just wanted to let you both know that we’re all counting on you.”
