Twitter Humour - 5 Ways To Get A Laugh

Fight rough. Play rough.  Wear a ruff.

I spend rather more time than I probably should on Twitter.  The main draw for me is that lots of people post very funny tweets.  I can't resist trying to do the same myself.  I don't think I can claim to be a master of Twitter humour just yet, but I am getting some retweets and favourites so I am sort of making progress.  Twitter is a relatively new medium for humour and what works elsewhere often doesn't work on Twitter, while there are things that are only funny because they are on Twitter and wouldn't work elsewhere.  Here are five joke formats that work well.


1. Subvert the Twitter format.

Twitter is a continual stream of tweets that never turns off.  Pretending it is something else creates a cognitive clash that can turn into a giggle.  For instance, I once tweeted "Always remember to take your belongings when leaving Twitter."  The grim reality is nobody ever leaves Twitter.  You take the odd break in the real world, but you always return.

"This tweet is not boring, it is just aimed at a niche audience" plays on the fact that most people on Twitter are talking mainly to other people with similar interests, and so their tweets make no sense to the rest of us who aren't in the know.

(Incidentally, jokes relying on obscure knowledge work well on Twitter because people love retweeting stuff like that.  One of my most retweeted jokes is "Cultural historians have over 30 names for C.P.Snow".   If you don't know who C.P.Snow is that joke makes no sense at all, but it seems that plenty of people do.

2. Mock fellow tweeps.

There is a lot of self awareness on Twitter of just how absurd the service is, and how odd the people who are attracted to it are.  This is ignored on a routine basis because, well, we are all in it together.  We pretend that we are the voice of the people debating weighty issues.  Any joke that reminds people that Twitter users are in fact an odd clique of weirdos will strike a nerve that elicits nervous laughter. "Discovered you can buy Twitter followers. When I've saved up, you bolshie lot of sods are history" destroys the pretence that we are all normal people just having a chat.

"My problem with Twitter is that I don't have an exit strategy" is another example of how us Twitter users are trapped in an endless and meaningless cycle from which we have no idea how to extricate ourselves.  All we can do is try to laugh about it.

3. Timing

As Henning Wehn has pointed out, timing is very important to comedy. He illustrates this with a joke.  "Who is the match between tonight?" "Austria-Hungary" "But who is the opposition?"  As he points out, this joke only worked between 1867 and 1918 when there was a state known as Austria-Hungary.  The timing is essential for the humour.

Timing is of course key to stand up comedy.  The interesting thing is that with Twitter you have time to think after you have read something.  The chances are that you are scanning down a list of tweets and you clock a humorous one.  You have time to mull it over while you are looking at the following ones.

In fact a good stand up joke doesn't work well on Twitter as a rule.  Stand up jokes are delivered as part of a routine and the comic's art is to build up the comedy.  There is no build up in Twitter, but there is time for reflection.  So you can get away with things that take quite a bit of work on the part of the reader.  For instance  "To be Frank, I braid my hair, pick up a battle axe and invade the Roman Empire" wouldn't be funny spoken out loud.  You wouldn't make the connection between being frank and being an actual Frank quickly enough.  It is only because you have time to search your memory and remember that the word is homonym for a tribe of barbarians that enables you to get it.

4. Reveal a weakness.

There is an art to self-deprecation, but I'm not very good at it.  Running oneself down works extremely well on Twitter as a humorous strategy, if only because it is such a refreshing contrast to all the earnest tweets extolling us to be more virtuous.

"I only make mistakes to make myself more approachable."

5. Third one odd.

Lists of three things in which the third one partially breaks the pattern are a standard joke format.  This approach works well on Twitter and is one of the rare examples of where the character limit actually helps the humour.

Seeing that rather charming Nicolas Hilliard miniature  instantly called up the response "Fight rough. Play rough.  Wear a ruff."

Following these rules doesn't guarantee your tweets will be funny and won't necessarily gain you lots of followers.  And indeed, what would be the point if they did?  But it is interesting to consider how the medium affects the message.