Anti-joke

"Anti-joke" is the name of one of my most successful recurring jokes. It's never the joke I start out to use - it's more of a recovery vehicle. Here's how it comes up.

It starts out with me telling a joke that turns out badly. I don't mean a bad joke in the sense of one that makes you groan, e.g. almost every pun ever invented. I mean a joke that starts with genuine intentions of being funny, but falls tragically short. The kind of joke that falls completely flat, that produces awed silence so astonishing that you couldn't just hear a pin drop, you could hear the whooshing of the wind resistance on its way down.

When I realize the horror of what I've just done, there's no choice but to come clean. First, I apologize. There's simply nothing else I can say at first that makes any sense. Then, I comment that if someone were to tell a genuinely funny joke at this moment, no one would laugh, because that joke and my joke would cancel each other out.

Sometimes I will continue, confirming that, yes, my audience had just witnessed a comedic feat so awful that it dipped below absolute zero funny, and reached a level of negative humor. Oh yes. An anti-joke.

Thankfully, the anti-joke routine is usually enough to make everyone laugh, or at least unclench from their full-body expressions of absolute horror at the inhumanity of the first joke I told them. Truthfully, the more awful the first joke, the better the reaction to the revelation of the anti-joke concept.

It's a very dramatic concept, the idea of an anti-joke, floating around out there canceling any funny it runs into.

Watch out.