By Adam Mulholland


Everyone loves a good joke, the funnier the better. If you have mastered the art of joke telling, you can pull it off easily. However, if you have not, you can ruin a good joke quickly. The art of telling funny jokes is all about setting it up, pulling off the punchline, and being confident in your skill.

Your audience is very important. It determines whether your joke will come off as funny or obnoxious. So you have to study your audience carefully before deciding on which joke to tell. There are four basic types to fit most audiences: the politically incorrect joke, the clean joke, the best joke ever heard, and the blond joke.

Build up anticipation with your set-up. The set-up is where you hook the crowd, grab their attention, and then lead them down a totally expected path. To do the perfect set-up, you have to memorize the joke and know it forwards and backwards so that it flows naturally. Keep in mind not to laugh during the set-up, which kills anticipation and ruins everything.

Now you want to kill them with the punchline. A good punchline is one that is totally unexpected and hits them from out of the blue. During the set-up, you took them in an expected direction. Then you hit them with a complete change of direction with the punchline, taking them off guard and that is where the laughs come in.

Timing is everything. After you set-up the perfect joke, you do not want to ruin your perfect punchline by getting your timing off. The best comics pause before they deliver a punchline. That keeps the anticipation in the air and the crowd on edge. Then they eye up one person in particular and throw the punchline out before looking at everyone else. If the timing is right, the joke is even better.

Be relaxed and confident when telling your joke. When you stumble over your words or fidget around, you make the audience a bit nervous and they are likely to lose interest. So you have to be relaxed when you tell the joke, it should be as if you are talking about everyday things and not telling a joke, that is how relaxed you should be. Then the joke will just come out naturally.

Think about the length of your joke, the shorter the better. The faster you can get through set-up and to the punchline, the easier it is to hold your audience's attention. Cut out all the unnecessary details, they are irrelevant, and stick the basics. The longer and more detailed a joke is, the harder it is to memorize, which can make it harder to set up.

The ability to tell funny jokes is a gift for some and a learned skill for others. It is the perfect skill to have in breaking the ice, cutting the tension, and meeting people. Always keep in mind though that you do not laugh at your own joke, at least not at first. You have to let the audience laugh first and then join in on the fun, before throwing another joke at them.




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