Well, look no further. Drop the rubber chicken and whoopee cushion, cause it's time to really be funny.



Ease up on life and yourself; get used to taking things with a grain of salt. See the humor in situations; you'll see that most situations, even getting a $200 dollar speeding ticket or falling down on a banana peel have humor written all over them -- the trick is finding them and being able to laugh at yourself.

You can't be funny if you don't have any references or material. The broader your general knowledge is, the funnier the remarks you'll make. You can't say a Homer-esque comment if you don't know who The Simpsons are, and Allllrrriiighttty then! doesn't have the same effect if you've never seen Ace Ventura: Pet Detective .

So the more you know film, TV, music, and everything pop culture, the greater the chance of being funny. Broaden your horizons and stay up-to-date with current events in the news, and you'll be surprised at how much material will randomly come to you. You may even get to be someone's lifeline on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? .

The rules of humor are analogous to those of poetry. These common rules are mainly precision, synthesis and rhythm. French philosopher Henri Bergson has said in an essay: "In every wit there is something of a poet." In this essay Bergson views the essence of humor as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humorist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.

The question / answer joke, sometimes posed as a common riddle, has a supposedly straight question and an answer which is twisted for humorous effect; puns are often employed. Of this type are knock-knock joke, light bulb joke, the many variations on "why did the chicken cross the road?", and the class of "What's the difference between..." joke, where the punch line is often a pun or a spoonerism linking two apparently entirely unconnected concepts.

Some jokes require a double act, where one respondent (usually the straight man) can be relied on to give the correct response to the person telling the joke. This is more common in performance than informal joke-telling.