This is a compact guide to making people laugh in everyday life. This guide is going to teach you how to add real and effective humor to your work meetings, to your presentations, and to your dates with attractive people. Read it and then practice.
Know the anatomy of a joke
Before you can make people laugh, you need to know how jokes work. There are three parts to a joke. The first part is to set context. This might be done completely and explicitly for a given joke, but it’s more often woven into earlier jokes or conversations so that its cost is amortized over several jokes. For example, in a comedy performance about me being an immigrant to the US from England, I said in my English accent, “I was standing in line at the checkout, waiting to buy my Thanksgiving turkey …”
The second part is to setup for the punchline. This involves leading the listener in one direction and priming them to laugh. For example, “… when the assistant said to me, ‘I bet you hate this holiday because this is when we …’” Now the joke is locked and loaded. The context is configured, and the joke is primed for the punchline.
The third and final part of a joke is the punchline itself. This is the statement that signals it’s time to laugh. In the example joke I’m using, the punchline is “… got rid of you guys.”
