5 Tips on How to be Funny

Anyone can be funny! Sometimes, it’s just about following steps to try and improve your humor. Here are five tips on how to be funny and improve your humor:

1.         Give the opposite answer to yes/no questions: I read that one of the easiest ways to be funny, even if you’re not, is to give the opposite answer to yes/no questions. If people are expecting you to say yes, you say no; if people are expecting you to say no, you say yes. This is Jennifer Lawrence’s go-to strategy for her own humor. The magic here is that the moment you give the opposite answer, you have surprised the audience, so they naturally laugh in response—after this, you can move on to the real story.

2.         Play with numbers: One way to be surprising is to play with numbers. Why? Because numbers are specific. When something is small, numbers tell. The same can be said when something is big. To be surprising, all you have to do is build up people’s expectation to be the opposite of what the number suggests. For example, when you’re about to say a very big number, add “only” before it; when you’re about to say a very small number, say something along the lines of “it’s a huge amount” beforehand.

3.         Use the Rule of 3: The Rule of 3 establishes a pattern, then ends with something unexpected. For example, “red, white, and barf” is something unexpected as a spin-off of “red, white, and blue.” This breakaway from the pattern created by the first two items builds tension and creates surprise, usually resulting in laughter. This example is also quite effective: “I love hot dogs, hamburgers, and handsome men.”

4.         Use real-life stories, not jokes: The beauty of using personal experiences as fodder for humor is that your life experience is unique, and, therefore, stories based on it are guaranteed to be original. The easiest way to be funny is highlighting actual funny things that happen in your everyday life. Jokes are harder to tell in real life than stories. Rather than tell jokes, exceptionally funny people tell relevant stories that have humorous elements. If people don’t find a story funny, no big deal, because the story has a point beyond just being funny—if people laugh, then all the better in the end!

5.         Delay the funny: The best-placed pun is actually at the end. Put the funny part at the end of the sentence. For example, if the fact it’s a cat is the surprise or twist, say, “In that box was a cat” instead of “there was a cat in the box.” An easy way to delay and replay the funny is to use callbacks. Callbacks bring together everything in the end—this is where you go back and reference items that just got a laugh or create something from items mentioned earlier in the conversation.