Making Jokes

So yesterday, slightly underslept, I embarked on a little pun-run on my twitter. It's a nice feeling, to make a joke - it feels like a little construction project. Some people liked it, some people didn't, which is fair enough. Puns are silly, and can be annoying. Which is part of the joy of them, if you're in the mood for them. They're deconstructive of our general agreement that words mean the things we usually use them for. If you're not in the mood for that, it can come across as a quite aggressive attack on linguistic norms - like a kid who keeps asking 'why', or sealioning (which is a delightful little term I came across today, thanks Mitch) It's a funny thing, because being funny in day to day life isn't work. It's a process of chemistry and connection - usually between very small groups of people. That's the reason why it's very hard to repeat an in-joke to another friend, and have it be as funny in translation; because being funny or having fun in real life is a two way connection. You're swapping energy back and forth down a narrow pipe, building terms of reference for play in a closed universe. It doesn't work if one side of the line is empty. Building a joke for an audience means building a one way pipe, ideally with a wide mouth on the other end - so that many different kinds of people can receive it. (Not all people, obviously - comedy is subjective. The way I think about it, the more open and accessible the joke is, the more open the pipe is, the channel becomes less direct, and the weaker the intimacy of the interaction becomes) Ideally, the illusion you create for your audience is of a shared joke - one of the reasons that many good comedians are reviewed as being "like chatting with a friend". But it is definitely an illusion. The person in your friend-group who is the funny one is likely to have some difficulty transferring that hilariousness to stage, because the two skills (being funny in real life, and being funny on stage) are different. Similar enough to be confusing, but different. Like German and Dutch. If you try one in the wrong environment, it seems jarring and odd. For comedians 'doing a bit' in social company is seen as a bit weird and aggressively performative, while trying to relate an in-joke on stage seems self indulgent and tone deaf. Anyway. This post started being about one thing (why puns can be annoying), and ended up being about another (the difference between building a joke for an audience and being spontaneously funny in real life). Maybe the underlying point of my little free associative ramble is that we suit our tone to our audience, in life, but online it's hard to know who your audience is, unless you're very heavily branded towards one kind of content, (which I can never bring myself to do) people will want very different things from you.