Humor and Why It Often Fails on the Internet – November 21, 2019

This post, https://rizziallen.wordpress.com/2019/10/26/humor-when-it-does-and-doesnt-work-2/, got me thinking about humor and the Internet. Humor frequently fails on the Internet, more so than in real-life situations. Some good examples are smiley faces, LOL (Laugh Out Loud), and humor that relies on tone of voice or written word. With tone of voice, a video on YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, Instagram, or your blog may reduce the likelihood of the humor falling flat. A point made in the above link about red vs. read when telling a joke is a great example. Another point made in the link above is how humor can be regional.

Getting back to smiley faces and LOL – these can go either way. Some people on social media and blogs intentionally insert smiley faces or LOL as a way to indicate humorous intent, but others do it to be sarcastic or hide non-humorous intent. If I know the blogger or vlogger well enough, I can usually figure out which one they are going for.

On my blog, I try to avoid humor most of the time, and I use the tag Humor – https://upsdownsfamilyhistory.wordpress.com/tag/humor/if I am doing it intentionally. There are likely going to be cases where I unintentionally inject humor in a post. It’s not my intent, but at times I will say something without realizing it’s humorous or may be interpreted as humorous by some groups. In a few cases, the humor tag is for a blog post I re-blogged or shared as it may be a serious topic, but the blogger made it directly or indirectly clear the post was meant humorously.

The flip side to posting a lot of humorous things is you may not be taken seriously when you post something important. This carries through in the real world as well. I don’t do humor at work or in non-work interactions. A good example was when my now ex was pregnant and we were at a conference. We got separated at one point. A friend of mine, known to be a jokester, came up to me and said she was in labor. At the time, she was about 5 or 6 months pregnant. I thought my friend was joking as that was his kind of humor. Turns out he wasn’t as verified shortly by someone who wouldn’t joke about something like that. She was having false labor according to the E. R. I asked who made the call to send joker guy to find me. I would never send a known joker to notify others of a serious situation.