Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Does Your Sense of Humor Suck? Tell the World!

 
Do you have a crappy sense of humor? Do you lack even the most rudimentary sense of comic timing? When you try to say funny things, do reasonably intelligent people fail to even recognize them as jokes, much less laugh at them?

If you’re dying to let the waiting world know that you’re barely more entertaining than a natural disaster, then the homemade demotivational poster may be for you. 

While it’s true that demotivational posters can be mildly amusing or even (rarely) genuinely funny, for the last several years they have been a cornerstone of the internet community’s effort to give inarticulate people easy, low-cost opportunities to suck at expressing themselves and then failing to be funny. In fact, a groundbreaking 2011 study by the Swiss Institute of Groundbreaking Studies has revealed that the demotivational poster is the single most efficient way of proving that you wouldn’t know funny if it walked up and kicked you in the crotch.1

The good news is that the novice poster creator isn’t simply thrown into the process without proper guidance on how to fuck up a joke. Indeed, humorless humorists have the option of borrowing liberally from several existing comedic styles, rather than struggling to make up their own awful style on the spot. Those existing styles include, but are not limited to, the following:


The Dennis Miller: You’re the smartest guy on Earth.
Make sure everyone knows it.


The Dane Cook: Punchlines? Who needs punchlines?


The Robin Williams: Sure, it doesn’t make a lick of
sense now, but if there’s enough cocaine involved,
this shit is hilarious.


The Carlos Mencia: 1. Find somebody else’s joke.
2.
Repeat it. 3. Hope nobody notices.


The Carrot Top: If you don’t know how to write a joke, better bring a shitload of props.


The Andrew Dice Clay: insulting people is cruel and unfunny—and that’s what makes you a piece of shit.


The Internet Meme: Don't even bother making a joke in the first place. Just repeat the same non-joke several million times.


Unintentional Irony: Mocking laziness while at the very same time being too lazy to notice your grade-school spelling mistakes might have been funny, if you’d actually meant to do it. But you didn’t.


That’s all there is to it—so gather up your goofy pictures and your fumbling grasp of the English language and get to work! When genuine humor takes its last, desperate, rattling breath and then dies at your feet, you can hold your head high, knowing that you did your own small part to help it along its way.



NOTES
1. The second most effective method of proving you’re unfunny is “being Larry the Cable Guy,” with “writing an unpopular, obscurely-named blog” coming in a distant third.

2 comments:

  1. The Swiss Institute For Groundbreaking Studies has really produced some groundbreaking work, unlike those useless bastards from the Polish Institute for Unnecessary Data.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very true. Frankly, I sometimes wonder why the Polish Institute for Unnecessary Data continues to get funding. They haven't produced anything genuinely useful since they designed that screen door for submarines.

    ReplyDelete