Have you ever uttered what you thought would be an awesome/ witty/ hilarious come back, punch line, witty retort, zinger, etc. only to have it go unheard or unappreciated? Or maybe you had a line that you thought would be awesome but when it came out it wasn’t funny at all. Tell me about your bombs.
Here is mine. I got in an elevator on the ground floor with some other people ( actually, they were beautiful women in bikinis, which just makes it all the more embarrassing )…
My friend and I get in. I push the button for the third floor
Person A: you are going up, too?
Person B: of course he’s going up. We’re in the basement, where would the down button even lead?
Me: middle earth?
Dead silence for the rest of the trip.
We’ve all made gaffes, so don’t come in here just to say “your joke was bad and you should feel bad.” Share your stories!
In a perfect world, their tops would have fallen off in appreciation.
I’ve bombed so many times, not to mention on the Dope…here’s another elevator story.
I was meeting a friend for lunch even tho I was sick. Temperature 99 degrees. Since my norm is around 97 I was a raging halucinatigen, but not necessarily contagious. My ears were operating like underwater drums. The two office girls who got on, commenting about the “boss guy” who did this and claimed this were titillilating me beyond my endurance. Finally, between floors, I bellowed, “Who? Just say who it is!” Didn’t mean to, but I was speaking from underwater drums. I just had to know because I might have known him.
They just tittered and exchanged secret smiles, and got off on their floor. I was left bereft and couldn’t explain it to my friend.
This one was embarrassing. I was at a party and we met a couple who said they haven’t been out in a while. They then stated they just had twins. In my typical witty fashion I shot back “Hey, so did I!” (implying I just scored with some twins). Even as the words are coming out of my mouth, my brain is trying to tell me that the proud parents of twins probably don’t want their wondrous event associated with some stranger’s fictitious threesome. Everyone, including my wife, just glared.
We were presenting a marketing plan to our client. My boss had come down with laryngitis, so while he was in the room, I was doing the actual presentation. I managed to get through it without any serious screwups until at the end I promised the clients, “If this doesn’t work, we’ll torch the place so you can collect the insurance.”
Nobody laughed. Nobody’s face even changed expression. My boss tried to wheeze out a laugh. Eventually the #2 client managed a weak “heh heh.” But the president of the company never even blinked.
At a conference I was attending, I was at the snack table during a break and a woman I was talking to grabbed a handful of peanuts, and said “I like nuts.” I answered “well, you are what you eat!”
Someone posted about their “gay ass first day of school”. For some reason I thought it would be an abject lesson in using light humor to teach language sensitivity to reply “we don’t need to know about your gay ass lol”.
Instead he was totally whooshed and got all of his teen skater friends and their unlimited supply of internet snark to mock my apparently über gay profile pic.
You ruined his plausible deniability. Inside, he was a seething mass of rage.
My wife is an art teacher. When she first started working, my best friend said that he didn’t know anything about art except the primary colors. I said “Let me guess, red, green and blue, right?” He looked very alarmed that I didn’t even know the primary colors.
i made a hilarious joke in a chat channel once, about a moose or a deer and something being dear or costly, nobody picked up on it.
I once made a comment to an exchange student saying ‘smarter than the average bear’. he looked at me like ‘you are a very strange person, and you should not say such things.’ I don’t think he ever spoke to me again.
It’s not always a bad thing if people dont pick up on things, its a good way to find out if people are in your little clique or are on your wavelength.
I’m walking out of the grocery store with a six pack in hand. Walking behind me (or slightly to the side and behind me) are the two 20-something year old ladies.
One girl says to the other: “Hey! You know what we need? We need some of that!” She then points dramatically at the six pack in my hand.
I turned around, smiled and said: “You talking about the beer or me?”
From the look of horror on their faces I infer that they were indeed talking about the beer.
One time I was drunk in a bar chatting w/ a fellow that was part of a group tour we were on. So we knew him, but not well. We did know he was Jewish as this was on Rosh Hashanah and we had all been discussing the holiday. My wife is Jewish but I am not.
I don’t remember how it led up to it, but I was trying to make a point about how I always seem to put my foot in my mouth w/ my jokes. So I mocked myself by saying “Hey, did you hear the one about the HOLOCAUST?”
The guy didn’t really get the angle I was going for and thought I was actually making light of the Holocaust, even though I was really pointing out how terrible I am at making jokes. Seems I proved my point rather well, I guess (though I still don’t think he should have gotten as angry at me as he did).
Long ago tech support job. My neighbor had a habit of walking away from his desk and not locking his machine. After the umpteenth time someone (not me!) had done shit to his computer, he threw a hissy fit.
“You don’t mess with another tech’s machine! It’s the code!”
“Well,” says I, in a pirate accent, “the code’s really more guidelines than actual rules.”
“NO, IT’S A RULE!”
Someone else three desks away got it, but my neighbor never did.
Only bombed because it fell on the ears of a 7 year-old…I think…walking through a parking lot this weekend, somebody was trying to pull out of a parking spot and slipping the shit out of the clutch.
‘Whoah fella, easy on the clutch!’ I said.
7 year-old says ‘What’s a clutch?’
‘That’s what that guy’s wondering’ was my reply, which was met with confused silence.
While teaching my son to drive a stick shift in my old pickup truck it was inevitable that he would at least once miss the 3rd gear in the H pattern and select reverse instead.
So he shifts 1…2…R and of course the transmission lets out a terrible noise of unmeshed gears and grinding.
At that point I casually said, " I see you’ve activated the reverse gear alarm"
Years ago, I got a phone call that wanted me to answer questions about TV and radio in the area. Part of the conversation went something like this:
Interviewer: What radio station do you listen to most frequently?
Me: names radio station
Interviewer: If for whatever reason, that station were to go off the air, what would you most likely turn to?
Me (without hesitation): Drugs.
Interviewer: silence
Me (after a few seconds of silence): That was kind of a joke.