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Comedians know that when you hear a good joke you usually laugh, but when you hear a *perfect* joke you sometimes just sit in stunned silence for a couple of seconds and then quietly say "that was very funny". This is a thread of me over-analyzing bits that made me do that.
The best absurd humor is tightly adjacent to banality. Every word in this tweet is perfect because you only have to change a word or two to turn this from a masterful joke into a perfectly bland statement. https://twitter.com/ClickHole/status/1063144644748476422
Deadpan sarcasm is hard in speech, and is 100x harder in writing. You have to start from full credulity, lead the reader to the edge of the disbelief, and then give them the tiniest nudge. "Myriad" jolts you over by being just non-standard enough. Genius. https://twitter.com/michaelpielocik/status/1246219454297649153
You'd think it would be funnier to have the quote and then find out he was stabbed as a punchline, but it's the other way around! Also this is an actual news channel talking about an actual assault, so somebody maybe risked their career for the chance to make one perfect joke.
In a basic joke when most people's minds would go A->B and you can go B->C, you say A->C and hope it clicks a second later. Sometimes you go A->D and lose your audience on the way. This goes A->G and takes several seconds to hit, but when it does it kills. https://twitter.com/JeffBisti/status/1234483873624600576
15 seconds, 14 cuts, each one is precise to the millisecond. This should get an Oscar for editing. https://twitter.com/HartYT_/status/1228149203261698048
Sometimes the teller makes the joke. I tell jokes like this every day to my wife and get a chuckle. But Kanye could be the only person on the planet who *didn't* mean this as a joke, who actually feels like the entire world is on his shoulders and now this water bottle is too.
This is a joke that was made thousands of times before, but when you compress it to the absolute limit it somehow become extra funny again. Jokes are always about compressing ideas. https://twitter.com/21stjenji/status/1189604986390503425
I think what makes this work is the emotional superposition of mocking sapiosexuals and sincerely feeling them. Whatever is your own feeling is about sapiosexuals you can overlay it on this joke and it works. https://twitter.com/babadookspinoza/status/1174996541737721856
A tricky text-based joke inside a hyper-dynamic visual meme format. Each component makes the other come alive. https://twitter.com/BagelTiger/status/1186453692825792512
Emojis let you do visual jokes in a text medium. It's a genre that didn't exist until just now. https://twitter.com/leftistthot420/status/1185020067022606336
The best jokes are eternal, but there's also magic to jokes that are entirely of-the-moment. You can't explain this joke to anyone who wasn't very online on one exact date in October 2019, a worldwide community bound together for a day. https://twitter.com/maplecocaine/status/1184548752553664512
A million people had an inkling of this joke when they heard the song, perhaps they tried to make it and failed. Somehow it took 22 years for someone to land it, which makes it even better. https://twitter.com/AbbieEvansXO/status/1092485690808549378
This meme is a symphony, 20 different things coming together in a crescendo. The tagline, the skeleton, the subtle misspellings, the font choices and the colors, the punchline. Each one alone is just a shtick, but here they all align perfectly. https://twitter.com/dasharez0ne/status/1104159546493362176
