What do you call facial hair on a cow?
A moo-stache.
Now that I’ve successfully managed to cull most of my readership, I think it’s time for a little clarification: this is a humour blog.
As much as I’ve succeeded in proving otherwise, I try my best, in every post, to be funny. You may not believe it. It’s absolutely 100% true – these are my best efforts. Which, ironically, is quite funny if you think about it.
Anyway, the blog is called “Funny for Nothing” and although the operative here is “funny”, I am infinitely more adept at the “nothing” bit – and that’s the closest I’ll come to an apology for not writing in a month and a half. I live on my own terms, bro.
As I have so magnificently demonstrated in the last forty-three posts, humour is hard. Of course, some people are just pure comic genius – take Charlie Chaplin for example, in The Great Dictator. Rather eerily, my humour also happens to be like the Great Dictator. I think that everyone’s laughing at my jokes (“Why was Hitler so surprised by the Allied advance? Because he did nazi it coming”) but actually, they’re just laughing at my teeny tiny moustache and ugly haircut.
Every time I write a post, I have to focus all my efforts on being funny. I’ve got to get in the groove, thinking, ‘Be funny, Mushroom Sup. Be funny. You got this’ and then taking deep breaths and doing my humour exercises, which are elaborate and super technical and difficult to explain to such a Plebeian crowd, but mostly consist of me putting my head in a paper bag and imagining Chairman Mao as a toddler.
As a rule, this does not work. Well, it does work in a sense; my mother generally tells me to stop “acting funny” (I have been informed that there is a subtle difference) followed by “you didn’t get this from my side of the family”. Which is probably what Mao’s mum told him when he tried to get the Chinese to manufacture steel in their kitchen stoves using old bicycle parts. Good guy.
On the other hand, whatever little wit I managed to accidentally churn out online dissipates entirely in real-life interactions. It is precisely the sort of thing for which the word “worse” was invented.
I am the meteorite of comebacks (I tend to crash and burn):
“Yo mamma’s fat!”
“Yeah? Well…“fat” is a relative term! Ha!”
Most of my wit occurs in retrospect. If I had a catchphrase it would be “Oh shoot, I should have said that!” To counter this, I’ve fallen into the habit of rehearsing situations in which I might be required to say something witty. I’m still waiting for a situation in which someone says something ridiculous about semi-aquatic marine mammals, so that I can say “That has got to be the seal-iest thing I’ve ever heard!” and then there will be uproarious laughter, following which everyone will applaud my razor-sharp wit and perspicacity, which I will then humbly attribute to my gifted genetic make-up.
Sometimes, though, I get lucky, and somebody does say something about semi-aquatic marine mammals, and even then, I successfully manage to botch up the whole operation.
Friend: “Hey, you know Flapper, that seal at the zoo…”
Me (*interrupts*): “OMG THAT’S SO SEALY HAHAHAHA”
Friend: “…he died yesterday.”
And then, in a flash of unparalleled brilliance,
Me: “…did he kick the fish bucket?”
…which is followed by a brief, horrified silence. Until I make it worse:
Me: “Is this crowd dead? I mean, c’mon guys, don’t be Flapper”
It’s helpful when your audience bursts into tears; that’s usually your cue to stop talking. But, well, you live and you learn. Oh darn, not again (sorry Flapper).
This is probably why I find I’m so bad at making friends. Everybody loves a funny person, and by logical extension of this fact, everybody hates me. Okay, fine, not “hate”, it’s more like, “I’m not sure if she just made a joke but she said something and laughed hysterically so I’m just going to chuckle to be safe and then back away slowly because she’s scaring me a little”. Most of my friends are my friends on the condition that I don’t try my hand at humour within a ten-mile radius of them.
They made me sign a document.
But you know what’s even harder than humour? Ending posts. It’s important for the end to leave an impact, but not be too abrupt.
Funny for Nothing 