Why Most Men Can’t Make Women Laugh

OK, every man and his dog knows women like humour, but I don’t see anyone talking about how to be funnier, so I’ll cover that here.

Basically, it goes like this, conversational humour is created when a statement is made which is completely unexpected but, in retrospect, makes perfect sense.

For a great example of humour in action, watch this quick video

Seen it yet? No?? Well it’s incredibly important that you do before reading the rest of this post so please watch it and come back.

Sorted now? Lovely.

Now forget about whether or not you thought that video was funny because that’s not the point. The point is that you definitely recognised it as being an attempt at humour, so why is that?

Because it had a setup which led to an unexpected punchline which made sense in retrospect.

As the dude talked, we were led to assume that the one kid who looked different wasn’t his, right? That’s what would generally happen in this kind of scenario. However; the punchline is that this is the only one of his kids that’s actually his! In fact, ALL of his other kids were fathered by someone else.

So after that, our brains are like:

“Oh yeah, it’s totally possible that this could have been the case! Because thinking about it, he didn’t say that one kid doesn’t look like him. He just said they look different from the others!”

And that’s what causes the humour and makes us laugh. It’s really that simple.

Any joke you’ve ever heard, no matter how funny or unfunny, involves a setup which leads you in one direction before hitting you with an unseen element of swerve which makes sense after the fact.

So with that in mind, try to see the potential for humour in your interactions with people and practice being funnier.

Of course, you don’t have to tell scripted jokes with official setups; they can also be purely off-the-cuff and observational. For instance, a while back, I matched a woman who was an aerial trapeze athlete and had a profile pic of her hanging upside down from her rings. However, her bio also said she’d turn my perspective upside down.

So I said, “Are you going to turn my perspective upside down with your awesomeness or by making me use your aerial rings?”

Not only did she find that hilarious, but I guarantee no one had said that to her before. So yeah, try to see the potential for humour in all your interactions.

Ciao for now.

Chaos is a ladder.

Excelsior.

Ciaran

Follow me on Medium and get my free ebook 5 Keys to Unstoppable Confidence.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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