Can anyone tell jokes successfully?

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Actually, I can make people laugh.
The trick is to scare them for a fraction of a second with something you say.
Sometimes I can't even understand why people find certain things funny.

Last edited by Martens on 20 Dec 2012, 1:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

nope, can't do it. I'm really good at killing a joke flat dead though; tumbleweed moments are my speciality

However I can make people laugh by making an idiot of myself or apparently when I really let myself 'go' I loose control of my body and the effect is hilarious by all accounts...........not sure I've found the funny side of it yet though!

I'm told I'm great at making people laugh -- I've been told to write things down and to do stand up by so many people but I'm not interested in that sort of thing. Humor has to happen naturally. If there's anything I've learned, it's that. A good joke is like lightening, you don't prepare for it or make it happen. It just happens. Probably the best thing to work on if you want to be good at telling jokes is getting rid of social fear. You can't worry about them not finding you funny. I know this is insanely difficult (I've been there), but it's like how they say not to show fear to wild animals because they'll smell your fear and attack you, or something to that effect... Having an audience (in any regard) when you're telling a joke is roughly the same equation. I personally don't like pre-fabricated jokes because they're resistant to an easy exit. What I mean by that is that if no one laughs, it's much more difficult to just keep talking. If you fit a joke naturally into a sentence when talking to someone, it's much easier to just keep on talking like you never intended on saying anything funny anyway. Having that sort of 'game face' like you're not intending to be funny is important. If someone's already laughing at a joke when they're telling it to you, it almost takes away the amount of laughing that's left for the person being told the joke.

Well, those are my suggestions. That, and exposure. Watch comedy, listen to it, read it... It's a pattern and once you get that pattern, you'll be able to repeat it. I wish you the best of luck as humor is a wonderful thing and it makes people happy to be around someone who can make them laugh so I encourage you to work on it. I got there so I'm sure you'll be able to!

Before I got the hang of humor, my specialty was nearly stopping people's hearts in sheer surprise over the fact that anyone would say such a thing... I learned, what I would refer to as "the wrong lesson" from that...because instead of not saying things like that anymore, I instead learned to find it funny when people looked so shocked. Yeah, I spent a few years there just enjoying people's surprised faces. It was so socially unacceptable...but even now, the idea of people's jaws just hanging there, flapping in the wind from the sheer force of my social ineptitude...it's just priceless. Because, honestly, I'd rather laugh at the past than blush until my cheeks catch fire...geeze, I'd certainly have the fuel to!

If you ask me, she's the one looking like an idiot. Whether she appreciated it or not, you were being really helpful to deter her from that eau d'Rat Death before she mortgages her house to buy another bottle. I mean, all that money and not even rats are going to be coming near her. I'd actually be concerned if anyone were drawn to that smell...I mean, just think of the men/women she's going to be attracting with that!? I'd probably get her a mini-pepper spray as a holiday gift...she might need it. O.o

I am primarily ADHD with a side of aspie (I think...)
I don't have a speech filter (either I don't talk, or I speak my mind freely) and have some rather random thoughts... When it comes to telling a joke just for the sake of telling a joke, I simply cannot do it. However, when caught up in a chat with someone where I am allowed to just let what is on my mind flow, I am apparently hilarious, or so I have been told.

Telling jokes? Hmm...deadpan humor is usually more successful for me.

I only have two favourite jokes that I've memorised and one of them ALWAYS goes wrong. I always begin it by saying:

"Right, this is my favourite joke, but it's rather long and hard to get right. I always miss out a crucial part and have to go back and start again, but I'll try very hard to concentrate and not do that this time."

Then I start telling the joke, get half way through, and realise I've missed out the crucial part.

Why oh why can't I get it right?

Hee hee!

It's hard for me to make a joke when I want to. I say things that make people laugh and people tell me I am funny. The only one who gets my jokes is my boyfriend he always takes his time to process the jokes. I never have people burst uit laughing when I intend to tell a joke.

Mostly not too well.

But this one time I was at a funeral/wake kinda affair. This guy that I knew told me a really bad joke, so I retalliated with the only joke I can tell:

So, these two guys walked into the locker room of the local golf course. They saw their buddy, Bob, standing very close to the locker, like he was almost inside of it, hiding. They said, "hey Bob, what's up." Bob, turned around and had a huge goose-egg on his forehead! They asked him if he'd been hit with a ball. He explained,"I was out in a four-some and these two ladies were approaching fast, so when they wanted to play through we got off to the side. The first lady hit her ball out of bounds into a cow pasture, and the ball stuck right in the bottom of one of the cows...unbelievable! So, the other lady played while the first lady looked and looked for her ball. I finally couldn't take it anymore and crossed the fence, walked up to the cow and lifted its tail, exposing the ball. I said, "Hey lady, does this look like yours?" She hit me in the head with a 9-iron.

The guy at the funeral burst out laughing and everyone turned to look at us. He whispered to me, "You son of a b***h, I pissed my pants, lucky I am wearing a diaper." I burst out laughing; again people looked at us like we were fools. He had just had prostate surgery, and had little bladder control.

It worked that one time.

I'm really good at telling jokes in the last 6 years but for most of my life my sense of humor including joke telling was abysmal. I had no ability to tell jokes because; joke telling requires one to have a current, robust and detailed understanding of the neurotypical culture and the NT sub-cultures. For most of my life my understanding of the NT world just was not that good. To tell a successful joke requires weird things like comedic timing that can't be easily quantified and structured. Telling jokes requires an understanding of the audience. You would tell different jokes to a group of doctors as opposed to a group of used car salesmen. Finally telling jokes requires you to build a raport the the audience large or small. The joke can string but should not be hurtful and moderating the effect is vital. Then there is the punch line. Every joke has a payoff known as the punch line. You can do everything right but if you fail to deliver the punchline effectively the joke falls flat. Most of all to tell a good joke you must actually like and trust neurotypicals in some basic ways or else you lose your audience. You must get your audience to buy into your personality or on stage persona. Like the stage persona's of Foster Brooks and Dean Martin were lovable drunks. Lucy was a physical slap stick comedian whose good intentions always led to crazy situations like shen she was selling VitaMeataVegiMin.

I know many autistic people who can tell a really good joke. I do a pretty good job telling jokes during my presentations where I share insights on living with autism. Google autisticwerewolf arizona 2014. Most people are SHOCKED when I share my sense of humor with them. Most people don't think autistic people have a sense of humor. Now don't think my autism does not make my sense of humor shift wildly from the standard neurotypical fare. My being autistic informs my humor so it is a bit off the beaten path. My jokes tend to focus on what I know the odd differences between my experience of life in the NT world compared to the way the NT world portrays or see's itself.

When telling jokes stick with what you know and I know my life as an autistic gay man. I know the strange things I struggle to understand and cope with in the NT world. I know the funny things that result from my being an autistic werewolf in a neurotypical world. I just share the funny things I know as a result of living as an autistic werewolf among neurotypicals. My jokes are successful and I often use jokes to share the struggles of being autistic in the NT world. It is hard to tell jokes when you are trying to be something you are not. I can't tell NT based jokes because; I lack the full understanding of what it is like to live everyday as an NT. If I tell you autistic life related jokes I will make you fall from your chair laughing and begging me to stop so you can catch your breath or keep from soiling your pants!

I'm terrible at telling long jokes. I get all tangled up and mess up the punch line. Other times, I find the joke I'm telling so funny that I can't finish the joke because I'm laughing. I'm not bad at funny observations or puns.

yes, I realize that this is an old thread. I solved the joke telling problem by looking on the internet for two jokes of the story with a punchline type. I chose two jokes that were absurd and not sexual. I learned them by heart and then learned to say them slowly. I practiced eye contact which is difficult for me. Then I practiced telling them over and over again.

That way when someone is telling jokes, I wait my turn and share what I have practiced.

I can only seem to remember one short joke at a time. I've already tried this one one everyone I know. It got a few laughs.

A duck walks into Walgreens and says, "I'd like some chapstick. You can put it on my bill."

Of course, it only works on people who remember a time when people had verbal credit accounts with retailers.

I think I am very good at telling jokes. I may never be a stand-up comic, especially after what my nephew said after I made a pun about my mom being too stuffed to eat turkey stuffing, but I'm good at learning, remembering, and telling jokes in general. I also seem fairly good at talking about ordinary situations and giving them a humorous twist, although sometimes people laugh when I'm being serious, and it hurts my feelings. I know at least one person who used to do that no matter what I said and then she was bewildered when I got angry and annoyed.

I totally suck at telling jokes. I'm funny when I don't mean to be funny LOL