Hi seddit! This is a rewrite of my askseddit comment here that I believe warrants it own post on the real seddit I think. The topic is humor. Humor is, in my opinion, one of the most important aspects of interacting with girls, and how to excel at casual/early conversations often comes up but is rarely addressed beyond 'just practice' and 'tell stories' - both of which are true of course.

Compare this to kino, which gets broken down in micro-pieces from the first touch until the bedroom (escalation ladders and all that jazz). For me personally, about 90% of my game is making the girl laugh and have a great time from the very start, after which she usually lets go of her barriers and starts taking care of the kino :-)

Why is humor so often overlooked in our community's approach of understanding and analyzing social interactions? I think it is because humor suffers the same fate as, say, mathematics (which I happen to have a degree in, and tought and spoken about to many people): people regard it as largely innate talent, and something that 'some people just have', and if you don't you're out of luck. Sounds familiar? Yes, this is what is thought of seduction itself too by the large population, but we know better don't we? :-)

So, let's be open minded, let go of these preconceived notions about humor and see what we can learn.

For one thing, I am convinced there are categories of humor - and I mean on a more detailed level than the 'irony', 'dark humor' etc distinctions you often hear. It is definitely impossible to put each joke in a category, but many jokes have a similar 'technique' that we can break down.

For example, I've found that most of the typical 'story' jokes ('guy walks into a bar ...'), and indeed most jokes overall, reach the punchline trough leaving out a piece of information, that is implied by the punchline and filled in in the listener's mind. So these jokes implicitly assume some knowledge in the listener, and communicating that nugget of knowledge in an indirect way is what makes it funny.

The nugget of knowledge that is filled in in your head may be about the world, but more often it's about the subject/situation at hand. Not sure if I make myself clear, but hang on for some examples.

So there you go, we have one 'recipe' for humor: communicate something about the situation/subject at hand, but in an indirect way so that the listener has to fill it in. Still a bit too broad for practical useage though.

One even more concrete case of this (and this will get us close to the point where you can 'construct' a situational joke; I actually started writing a chatbot once that had a sense of humor like this but sadly lost all the code before it was finished :-( ), would be to compare the situation/person we want to mock a certain property of, to another one that has the same property. A second case is to not compare it, but to say a consequence of the mocked property. In both cases, the nugget of communication we leave out is the property being mocked, but we will imply it, which is what (hopefully) creates the humourous effect.

Ok, thanks for bearing with me so far, time for examples. To prove my point that these can be constructed, I'll try to invent on the spot some mocking comments one could say about a women's bag using this recipe, and it will be obvious which property of it we mock:

  • Please be careful when putting that hand bag down; you might damage the floor! (property: big and heavy, type 2: consequence is that big and heavy things damage the floor when dropped)

  • Let's move to a quite place for a moment so we can talk, how about inside your handbag? Careful we don't lose the way to the exit in there though. (property: big, type 1: comparing to a maze)

  • Nice hand bag, maybe you should sell it so you can buy this place and fire the DJ. (property: looks overly expensive, type 2: selling something expensive gives you a lot of money and you can buy entire clubs with that. Notice how I also did the same with the nugget 'the music sucks here' - I didn't even do that one consciously :-))

  • Please put that hand bag away somewhere, it's blinding me! (property: shiny color, type2).

  • Man, you should hold that hand bag up so I can easily find you back after I went to the bar. (property: again shiny color, but now type 1 comparing to a light house or beacon or something)

Now, I am the first to admit that none of these is hilarious, but I am also sure that in a conversation they would definitely at least bring a smile to most people's face, and I came up with all of them on the fly while writing this, picturing just a girl with a hand bag and thinking of a property I could mock of it.

So there you go, at least one type of humor I think I can say we have now 'formalised', making it possible to 'construct' a funny line mocking some visible property of some object/person/situation. Compare it with just pointing out the mocked property which is not funny at all ("your hand bag is big").

Ok, so what do you think? Are we on the road to a potentially infinite source of cocky funny openers and conversation makers here, or am I stretching it?

One thing is certain: make a girl laugh and she'll want to keep being around you.

On to you, seddit! Got other techniques for being funny?

(ok I'm gonna rewrite that chat bot now, I miss her ;-))