How to Come Off as Witty as You Think You Are: Tips for Effortless Humor Online

There is a reason delighting in the fashion foibles of celebrities is a popular online pastime, why “The Landlord” from FunnyOrDie.com was an instant classic (more than 73 million views so far), and why what happens in your everyday life can produce the biggest laughs on Twitter and Facebook. When it comes to standing out on the Web, funny wins every time.

But what if you simply aren’t that comical, or have trouble translating your brand of humor into something that online audiences will find amusing? It’s not as hard to do as you might think.

Write Like You Talk

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“I’ve always been one of the main people in my circle of friends who was always cracking jokes or was always being light-hearted about a situation,” says blogger Shareka Roberts, who is also known as “Fresh” on her satirical blog Crunk & Disorderly, which skewers African-American celebrities and pop culture figures. “How I write is directly the same as how I speak to my friends in real life.”

While writing just like you speak is one way to see if your sense of humor works for online audiences, honesty can stir up laughs from out of no where too. “A lot of people think funny things in their head all the time, but they just don’t say anything. That’s one of the main reasons I love Twitter. Everyone’s a comedian, or comic rather, on Twitter because — you have how many characters? 140? — to say whatever is on your mind,” Roberts says. “People generally tend to speak their honest opinion — they regret it later, of course! — but they say whatever. I think that’s what a lot of people who are considered to be funny___ that’s what we do.” If that doesn’t work, try being a “more sarcastic version” of yourself online, she suggests.

Blogger Amy Corbett Storch, who chronicles the humorous highs and lows of juggling parenting and life in general at Amalah.com, has similar advice. “Think about the last time you told a story to your friends at a bar or dinner party and got a laugh. Now try writing that story down and see if the humor translates. Sometimes it’s just a ‘write like you talk’ thing; sometimes you might need to punch it up with photos or illustrations or mess with the structure a little bit,” Storch says.

Dan Abramson, a writer with FunnyOrDie.com, actor Will Ferrell’s and writer/director Adam McKay’s comedy video website, has another take on how to inject humor into your blog. “Blogs are inherently funny. Just the word can make someone laugh. It’s hard to take someone seriously if they’re talking about their blog. Especially if they have vlogs, too. So with that in mind, just own it. Acknowledge that the world of blogging is just funny in and of itself. I think if you have fun with it, other people will too. The format lends itself to ridiculousness, and if you try too hard to be funny on top of that, people will get turned off,” Abramson says.

There’s A Difference Between Edgy and Offensive

While it may seem that “anything goes” when it comes to blogs, tweets, and TMI-ing on Facebook, there are some subjects you should probably avoid when looking for laughs, like death, incurable diseases, and kids, says Roberts. While she has her own standards of what she will and won’t find the humor in, she says people need to come up with their own personal guidelines for where to draw the line. “That’s the thing about humor___ What one person thinks is too far may not be far enough for their audience to get a response out of it,” she says.

“I think the same subjects that are off-limits in real life are the same in blogging,” says Abramson. “That said, things can exist context-free on the Internet. It’s the reason why Antoine Dodson went from random eccentric living in the projects to international singing sensation. You can focus on his over-the-top ridiculousness, and easily forget that the original video was actually a newscast of him defending his sister who was almost raped. Rape, the reigning champion of off-limits subjects in mainstream comedy. Can’t really turn on reruns of Frasier to find Niles Crane making rape jokes,” he says.

Knowing your audience may be the best way to gauge where to draw the line between what’s funny and what’s offensive, says Storch. “I’ve seen just about everything on earth played for laughs on the Internet. Everything. And I’ve seen some of it done really, really well, to the point even I can’t believe I’m laughing. I’ve also seen it done really badly and been kind of offended,” she says.

Snapping funny pictures of people on the street and sharing it with your Twitter followers is another gray area of online comedy. For example, you are out on the street and see some unfortunate old man donning a pair of shorts with black socks and sandals. Celebrities who are in the public eye are one thing, but should you go after people who didn’t ask to be photographed and tweeted about?

“I try not to do twitpics of people who I don’t know. I’m a pretty open person [though] so I’ll ask a person, ‘Let me take your picture,'” Roberts says.

Befriend the One-Liner

Twitter and Facebook are two of the biggest tools for promoting your blog and generating audiences in their own right, so it goes without saying it serves as an extension of your humor, albeit in smaller doses. So what makes for a funny tweet or Facebook wall post or status update? Absurdity, perceptiveness, and self-deprecation are tops with Storch, as well as “something that makes me think, ‘OMG, I know!’ and wish I wrote it. And no spelling errors, typos or excessive abbreviations,” says Storch.

While Abramson jokes that references to Beverly Hills Cop are always winners on social networks, “Facebook posts and tweets really lend themselves to the one-liner, which is hard. Not as hard as taking down a gang with the help of Judge Reinhold though,” he says.

If It Doesn’t Work, Who Cares?

The great thing about the relative informality of the blogosphere is that it tends to allow you to be more of who you are — less uptight — an advantage that bloggers and website content producers who don’t think they have a natural gift for humor need to seize upon.

“That informality can free you up, bringing out some great humor. If you’re just writing your own blog and you have nobody to report to, you can do anything you want,” says Abramson. “And if it doesn’t work, who cares? Just edit it. Write something else. The shelf life of most things online is pretty short and nothing’s really set in stone. And that’s really fun,” he says.

So visualize your friends in front of you, or pretend like you are emailing a friend, and make that a blog post. Blogging is really nothing new in the modern sense of the word, says Storch. We’ve almost been doing it for ages.

“I recently found a big stack of short stories and essays I wrote in college and my early 20s that I guess I hoped to have published in the traditional sense — and with just a couple exceptions, they are terrible, and sound nothing like me. They sounded like what I thought a magazine or paper would print as “‘funny.’ The only drafts I think are funny are — if you can believe it — just stupid stories I wrote down to make my friends laugh in class. Stuff mocking our professor or an author we were reading and disliked, or stories about me getting drunk and falling out of a cab, or about ‘That Time I Did That Really Stupid Thing.’ Basically, I was writing blog entries for them before there was such a thing,” Storch says.

Above all, Roberts says bloggers and tweeters who aspire to generate knee-slaps should just simply “have fun” with it. Of course, if you plan to joke about others, you should probably prepare for a few barbs to come your way, as well. “You have to develop a thick skin in order to be dishing it out to thousands of readers everyday,” she says.

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Jennifer Pullinger is a freelance writer and book and film publicist in Richmond, Va. Visit her at www.JenniferLPullinger.com or @JLPullinger.