On Funny; or, number three

(How did I not call my first post "First Post!"? Shame on me.)

Earlier today I posted about what ultimately was a pretty banal three seconds in my life: I tried to turn my TV on and it didn't come on. After I moved the remote to a different angle and pressed the button again, and nothing happened, I realized what was wrong: I was pressing the wrong button.

In that moment I really was worried that my TV was broken; it's pretty expensive, I've only had it for a year, and frankly, as a smart TV, I assume that something will go wrong. But once I looked down and realized I wasn't pressing the button I thought I was, all that worry went away, and I was left feeling silly.

Like I said, this probably happens to many thousands of people every day, but I have a weird compulsion to tell dumb jokes about my life. So how to turn this humdrum three seconds into a joke suitable for social media?

Well, first, brevity. It's supposedly the soul of wit, but it's also the flesh of a social media post; my description up there was 562 characters, which is a little long for a Bluesky post (they cap at 300), and even a standard Mastodon post (500 max). So I had to trim it down, which leads into the second part: removing detail. Make it a specific experience, but give the reader just enough that they can assume a funnier scenario than what actually happened. That lets them imagine – the third bit – an exaggeration of what actually happened. Instead of "I spent three seconds pressing a button twice, worrying about it not working, before I actually looked down at it", I'm "increasingly distressed as my TV won't turn on, pressing the button repeatedly".

Of course, those aren't rules, much less absolute ones. Mel Brooks is the king of keeping a joke going so long that it gets funny again. Arin and Dan over at Game Grumps get a huge amount of mileage out of jokes with an excess of detail. Steven Wright got famous with observational anti-humor. But they are the guidelines I used for making this experience into a social media post.

Then again, across two sites, this post got five likes and no boosts.

So maybe don't listen to me.