Imagine the following: you’re at a pizza joint with a lovely guy and the vibes are good but you’re kinda suffering from first-date awkwardness. When your pizza arrives, you grab a slice, get serious, and then say: “Why did the hipster burn his mouth on the pizza…?
“... Because he took a bite before it was cool.”
DONE. The ice is broken, and the date thus sails forth on a strong current of laughs and conversation.
Or how about this…?
You’re at an all-hands year-end function, and your boss introduces you to his wife and new baby. You coo over the child a little so your boss says “Here…” and tries to hand her to you.
You say: “Oh, no thanks, I’m a vegetarian.”
He stares at you slack-jawed and then explodes into laughter.
Congratulations, you’ve just successfully emblazoned yourself in his memory; he’ll be retelling that line for years to come.
You get the point, right?
A great sense of humor is like the Holy Grail of social skills, whether you’re on a first date, trying to stand out to your boss, strengthening friendships, endearing yourself to family, or connecting with colleagues.
Being funny makes people more likable and more approachable. It garners respect and affection, particularly when the jokes are well-timed and appropriate to the audience.
Yet despite the role humor plays in greasing the wheels of our relationships, we’re never really taught how to be funny. A good sense of humor is either something you’re born with or it’s something you absorb from the people who surround you from a very young age.
As a team of nerds who are devoted to lifelong learning and personal growth, we here at Brainscape refuse to believe that being funny is an ephemeral skill left to the sheer chance of personality or parentage. We believe that you can learn how to become funny and improve your sense of humor.
This prompted us to do two things: (1) to research and write this guide that teaches you the skills you need to become a funnier person, and (2) to compile a flashcard collection of the best jokes, puns, and one-liners that you can then whip out at opportune moments.
We’ll dive into exactly how these adaptive flashcards work in a bit (because it’s an important step in improving your sense of humor) but right now, I’d like to emphasize a little something…
You CAN get better at being funny!
Being funny is a skill, which means that with the practicing of good techniques, you can get better at it. Professional stand-up comedians aren’t effortlessly funny for one hour straight, although the best ones certainly make it seem that way.
Rather, for every hour on stage, they probably spend 100 hours observing life for its little ironies; writing down thoughts, puns, and one-liners; word-smithing their jokes until they’re just right; and then practicing to perfection the verbal and physical delivery of those jokes.
I know all about the work, skill, and practice that goes into cultivating humor.
Ten years ago, I started a science blog that used humor to help people learn various lessons about Earth, the universe, and human nature, from why the sky is blue to what life on Mars would be like (and should you pack a sweater for the journey?).
After five years of contributing to that blog, I compiled my best pieces into a book: ‘Why? Because Science.’
This effort required me to return to my earliest blogs and polish them up for publication. In that process, I was given a front-row seat to how far my humor had come. It’s like being completely unaware of how much your appearance changes over time and then looking back at a photograph of yourself from 10 or 20 years ago and seeing the differences.
Sure, my early writing was solid, but with time and practice my delivery had become much snappier, my puns more on point (and universal), and my quips, wit, and unexpectedness honed to a finer edge.
In other words, I learned to be funnier through practice.
And so, in teaching you how to be funny, I shall be drawing on both the scientific literature on what makes humans laugh and my own experience as a humor writer.
Remember, we’re not aiming for perfection here, but if you understand from the outset that being funny is a skill, you’ll have the right mindset to invest the time and practice it takes to get good at it.
7 Simple ways to improve your sense of humor
Truth be told, there are probably 700 (or 7,000) tricks, tools, and techniques for improving your sense of humor. But the 7 we’ve listed here are the core skills for good humor: listening, collecting, and memorizing; being unexpected, relevant, and resilient; and of course, perfecting your delivery.
Let’s dive in…
Pay attention, listen, and collect.
The first way to improve your humor is to use your environment and the people in it as inspiration. In other words: riff off of the situation and the things people say or do.
Funny people seldom cook stuff up on the fly. Rather, they have an extensive repertoire of funny sh*t to say, which they cleverly draw upon when the time is right.
Like that time your friend's date didn't show up to the gym, and he casually dropped the grenade: "I don't think we're gonna work out."
How do you build a repertoire? That’s easy! You just have to pay attention, listen, and collect!
Funny people are dialed in: they collect stories, ironies, characters, ideas, jokes, puns, metaphors, one-liners, and other funny flotsam and jetsam… and then they either use them verbatim at the right time or tailor them to make them their own.
After all, isn’t all creative work fundamentally made from recycled parts?
As Pablo Picasso said: “Good artists copy, but great artists steal.”
You don’t need to invent from scratch the funny things you want to say to be funnier in conversation. But you do have to bank them in your brain so that when you receive the right cue, you can clap back quickly.
(You can also use Brainscape’s Funny Jokes flashcards! We’ve whittled the fruits of the internet down into the very funniest jokes, puns, and one-liners that are super quick and easy to tell. This is an excellent starting point for accumulating great jokes. But more on that in a bit.)
Work on remembering those “nuggets”
It’s because funny people already have a repertoire of jokes that they appear so witty when, in reality, they probably discovered that little nugget of comedy gold weeks, months, and years ago. They just made the effort to remember it so that they could unleash it at precisely the right moment, like a well-timed fart in a school assembly.
So, your next step is this: whenever you hear something you find funny, write it down, put it in a spreadsheet, capture it in the “notes” app on your phone, or even make a flashcard for it in Brainscape.
If this sounds like work to you, sorry. Building your “funny bank” or repertoire is simply the fastest way you’re gonna start being funny, second only to using Brainscape’s already-made Funny Jokes flashcards.
When I was writing ‘Why? Because Science!’, I was constantly on the hunt for clever expressions, metaphors, and turns of phrase by other people and writers. They were like fertilizer for my brain, and if I didn’t end up stealing them outright, I’d bend them to the context of what I was writing.
Does that make me a thief? Absolutely. (All writers are thieves and shouldn’t be trusted. They may steal your story for a plot or pilfer your personality for a character.)
Anyway, I’d keep a notebook of these ideas so that they’d remain fresh and available to me should the context arise for me to use them. British author Neil Gaiman calls it his “compost heap.” It’s a thing. Most writers do it and you should too.
Use flashcards to bank jokes in your brain
Once you’ve started accumulating nuggets, thus begins the work of remembering them and for this, there is no better, more efficient learning tool than Brainscape!
Brainscape is a flashcard app that uses a suite of cognitive science principles—like spaced repetition—to help millions of people around the world learn more efficiently.
You may have used flashcards back in school to study for tests but no matter how old you get or the topics you wish to learn, flashcards never go out of fashion.
The ancient Greek philosophers used them to memorize epic poems because flashcards, as it turns out, are the perfect tool for tapping into your brain’s hardwiring for learning and remembering large volumes of information fast.
The ancient Greeks knew this, and now you do too!
So, how can you use flashcards to memorize jokes?
Simple. Use Brainscape!
As I mentioned before, Brainscape has already done the work of accumulating the best of the Internet’s “best jokes” lists into a collection of the funniest jokes, quips, one-liners, puns, and metaphors that are quick and easy to tell.
We then transformed them into a format that makes them super easy to remember and effortlessly deliver in any appropriate social situation in a way that best fits the moment.
The unique thing about these flashcards is that the "question" side is not part of the joke itself but rather a simple cue or prompt that trains you when to remember the joke in the real world.
For example, in my opening hipster joke, the question side of the flashcard reads: "What's that joke about the hipster and a pizza?" where the full version of the joke would be confined to the answer side.
The goal of this learning format is not to memorize the answer to the joke’s prompt. It’s to connect hipsters and pizzas with the whole joke so that the next time you’re in a pizzeria or see (or make fun of) a hipster with a friend, your brain will trigger this joke for you, which you can then effortlessly deliver.
This allows you to easily repurpose the joke in many ways, depending on your situation. Practicing these flashcards, again and again, will help you efficiently ingrain lots of jokes and their prompts in your brain!
So if you need a good jump start, definitely get our Funny Jokes flashcards in your corner.
Be unexpected and surprising.
There are virtually unlimited circumstances in which you can be unexpected or surprising simply by saying or doing something different to, or even the opposite of, what’s expected. And if you nail the delivery of this, you’ll successfully engage one of comedy’s greatest, most powerful tools…
Being Jewish.
Just kidding. The answer is irony.
See what I did there? YES, there are a lot of Jewish comedians, but you weren’t expecting that at all. My answer was, therefore, while kinda true, entirely unexpected.
And being unexpected, surprising, and ironic is funny!
Here are four easy techniques you can try for yourself…
Technique 1: Say “yes” when you mean “no”
The simplest formula to follow when trying to engage irony for a humorous effect is to say “yes” when “no” is strongly expected, and vice versa:
- It’s finishing every crumb on your plate and then, when the server asks if you enjoyed your meal, saying: “As you can see, I hated every bite.”
- It’s your parents asking you how you’re feeling after you’ve traveled 36 hours to visit them and you say: “Good! I find long-haul flights so refreshing!”
- It’s admiring a spectacular sunset with your friends and breaking the appreciative silence by saying: “Gosh that’s ugly.”
In some instances, like the first example, you can say “no” when “yes” is expected but in many other cases, like in the other two examples I gave, this technique simply involves saying the opposite of what’s expected or what everyone is feeling or thinking.
Get your delivery right.
I’d like to interrupt my description of the four techniques for being unexpected to introduce a fifth tool for improving your sense of humor—one that’s essential for getting these techniques right—and that’s delivery.
Like location, location, location is to real estate, delivery, delivery, delivery is to humor. A bad delivery can WRECK a joke just like a cigarette wrecked the future of commercial zeppelin travel. (Damn you, hydrogen, why can’t you be safe and explosively flammable at the same time?)
But this is especially true for jokes that employ irony. You see, if someone isn’t familiar with your brand of humor, they may not get that you’re joking, which, at best, will get you “crickets” and, at worst, could come across as being contrary or hostile.
So, deliver it with a sparkle in your eye and just the littlest of smiles. To their surprise, the person will probably look at you to gauge what you meant. If they see that you’re suppressing a smile or smiling with your eyes, they’ll immediately get it and laugh with you. If, however, you’ve got a deadpan expression, they may question whether or not you’re joking, which just makes the situation awkward. 🐢
Outside of irony, here are some tips for improving your delivery of jokes and one-liners:
- Watch your physical demeanor: being rigid and physically uptight translates terribly when you’re trying to be funny. Work on loosening up and appearing confident and happy. (Fake it until you make it, right?)
- Practice your verbal delivery, paying attention to natural pauses (to build suspense) and voice variation (i.e., not telling jokes in a monotone). You want to sound natural, not like you’re awkwardly reciting something you memorized.
- Tell jokes that you find funny. If you believe a joke is funny, you’ll tell it with more conviction, which will translate into your confidence.
- Smile, but don’t laugh hysterically at your own jokes. (My dad always cracks up at his own bad puns and somehow, it makes them even more unbearable.)
Okay, back to those techniques for being unexpected!
Technique 2: the “Rule of Three”
The next technique is the “Rule of Three,” which is MUCH easier to illustrate with examples than it is to describe:
- I’m honored, thrilled, and utterly terrified to be up on this podium, delivering this talk to all three hundred of you!
- Thea is a travel bug, a bookworm, and mildly alarmed by how many arthropods she can be at once.
- I’m here to teach you to be more charismatic, more competent, and other things that start with the letter ‘c.’
Catch the pattern?
The Rule of Three says that when you provide a list of items or adjectives, have the final item be completely unexpected and, at times, the opposite of the other two.
This is a useful technique in writing when you have the time to cook up creative list combos, but with a little practice and the remembering of key sequences, it’s also totally possible and easy to use in conversation.
Technique 3: the character “Switcheroo”
When you’re telling a story that has at least two characters involved—particularly when those characters have very different traits—there could be an opportunity to perform a switch for an unexpected twist.
Here are some examples of how you might employ this in real life:
Example 1
Someone: “I was on a hiking trail the other day and ran into a black bear”
You: “Oh no! Poor bear, it must have gotten such a fright!”
Example 2
Someone (to your partner or friend): “Oh, I love your hair!”
You: “Ah, thanks!” *strokes back invisible locks*
(This only works if it’s obvious that you’re not the target of the compliment because (1) the person next to you has an amazing head of hair or (2) you’re bald.)
Example 3
This one I’ll borrow from an Ellen DeGeneres Show episode in which she’s interviewing Sophia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon, who are seated next to each other on a couch:
Ellen says to Sophia: “Your English has gotten better, I have to say”
“Her English?” Sophia gestures to Reese and the audience erupts into laughter.
It’s beyond obvious that Ellen was talking to Sophia, who is from Colombia and who has endeared herself to the world with her comical mishaps with the English language. And yet, upon being complimented for her improved English skills, she seamlessly turns to Reese and makes it seem as though Ellen is complimenting her, even though everyone knows that Reese is about as American as apple pie. That’s what makes this so funny.
Technique 4: Invert your numbers
Yet another technique for being unexpected is to play with numbers by building expectations for one number-related outcome and then innocently dropping the exact opposite of what was expected.
Example
“We’ve sent out 200 wedding invitations… so, you know, we’re keeping it small and humble.”
Ha! 200 Guests might be a humble gathering for a convention but for a wedding? That’s pretty darn big, which directly contradicts the number implied by the latter part of the sentence—"small and humble"—making it unexpected and funny.
Okay, so now that you have some solid techniques to start working on, let’s move on to the other side of the equation: the people who will be on the receiving end of your humor!
6. Be relevant and appropriate to your audience
You’ve got to be tuned in to the people you’re telling the joke to and the context in which you find yourself. This is almost as important as the actual joke you’re telling!
Mark my words…
If, in your never-ending quest to be funny, you say whichever joke that pops into your noggin—even if it has absolutely nothing to do with the context or conversation you’re in—expect the following:
- People will get desensitized to your attempts at humor so even when you are really funny, they probably won’t laugh;
- People will start to find you annoying because you constantly undermine the gravity of every conversation;
- You’ll rip the wind out of the sails of your joke. Jokes are exponentially funnier when they borrow from the energy of the moment or the situation.
Also: read the room.
You can’t let rip a filthy joke to your church group and expect a round of applause. Sure, if you’re masterful in your discernment, you can push the boundaries a little and make otherwise conservative people blush.
But an essential part of being funny is taking the temperature of the people you’re with and correlating your attempts at humor with theirs… or at least what you know or estimate it to be.
So, save your disturbing, dirty, and/or politically incorrect jokes for your close friends.
7. Don’t be a baby!
This brings me to the final tip for improving your humor.
Don’t be a baby i.e., snowflake ❄️
I’ll try to keep this as politically correct as possible but… as you’ve no doubt gauged from Netflix’s many wonderful stand-up comedy specials, a lot of comedians poke fun at certain groups of people based on their culture, history, and ethnicity.
Stereotypes! This is our favorite kind of humor, is it not?
It’s funny, and it’s relatable but, more importantly, it’s acknowledging the differences that exist between humans and dispelling the tension that might otherwise arise. It also draws attention to the disparities and injustices that persist and, through the vector of humor, allows disenfranchised people to reclaim their power, spread a message, and help others feel seen.
If you feel offended, take the person who made the joke aside and explain why you found their humor hurtful. If that person is a celebrity with 10 million followers, don’t watch their sh*t anymore. Simple.
The people who are successful at satirizing stereotypes tread an ultra-fine line with the major payout being that they make people laugh. A lot. So much so that Netflix pays them to record and broadcast their comedy specials.
But they also make some people really angry because those people don’t understand that the role of comedy is to honor the differences between people by poking fun at them, not by ignoring them or pretending they don’t exist.
As American Humorist Erma Bombeck said: “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”
Final thoughts on how to be funny
Humor is a crucial aspect of human interaction that goes a million miles in enhancing our relationships with partners, friends, family, colleagues, and, yes, even ourselves. But while some people possess a natural talent for making others laugh, humor is a skill that can be developed and improved upon with the kind of practice (and tools) we’ve laid out in this guide.
By observing others, experimenting with different types of humor, and building your repertoire with Brainscape’s Funny Jokes flashcards, anyone can become funnier and more confident in their ability to connect with others through laughter. Humor is a powerful tool that can bring people together, bridge gaps, and create moments of levity in even the crappiest of circumstances.