Daily Archives: November 21, 2009

I receive and forward a lot of email jokes. I’m pretty well known among my friends for being a nexus for humour. But in my years of reading emailed jokes, I have observed that there are many people out there who really don’t understand how to tell a joke well. (Worse, if I receive a joke several times over the course of a few years, it typically gets more and more ruined each time I get it – people are destroying it with their unneeded and misguided additions.) I’ve had to edit quite a few just to un-kill them. So I’ve decided to give some advice for those who want to write down some joke they recently heard to send around. Please read this and heed these pointers if you want to be funny. These are not tut-tutting po-faced rules! They are practical advice based on experience. The entire point is to be funnier.

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