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.

How do you keep a blonde in suspense? Anyway, there is a whole bunch of ways to find good jokes for just about any occasion. It is really just a question of who your audience is going to be. Canon printer geeks go to conventions, politicians go to their lobbyist. Get it? Politicians/ lobbyists… well there’s no accounting for taste. So, head for the people that you want to make fun of. Most people have a pretty good sense of humor and are ready to laugh at themselves.

The real trick to finding a good joke is finding the right place and audience to tell the joke. A joke intended for somebody facing 10 years in prison is not the joke to be telling a Rabbi on the mount. Oh, did you hear about the Priest the Monk and the Rabbi who went into a bar? This is for Blonde …ah…readers that are still thinking about the first eight words at the start of this article. Oh, and that is all of the fingers on your right hand and all but the pinky and wedding ring finger on the left hand. Poking fun also works well if a little competition is going on. If there is a wide perception about a group of people, regardless of how big that group happens to be, there are likely going to be jokes floating around about that group. Competing schools for instance; what happened when Joe, the football player, transferred from UCLA to USC? The GPA for both schools went up. And now, to complete the running gag for blondes, the answer to; how do you keep blondes in suspense is.