5 Popular Jokes That Only Make People Want to Punch You

5 "Actually ..."

Sounds Like ...

"When I think about how dumb I was as a teenager, I wish I could travel back in time and kick my own ass!"

"Actually, if you traveled back in time and encountered yourself, the space-time continuum and the universe itself would collapse."

I'm not talking about all uses of the word "actually" here, I'm talking about when people use it in response to a statement that's clearly meant as a joke. This comes from people who always feel like they have to have the last word, or otherwise "top" what you just said.

Why People Do It

I once made a joke about how I'd rather be shot into the core of the sun than watch a full season of anything written by Joss Whedon. It was a quick jab at a group of my friends who would bottle the air if they knew it contained one of his farts. What I got in response was a complete stranger butting in with "Actually, you'd never make it to the center of the sun because the temperature of its atmosphere is 300 times hotter than the surface. You'd disintegrate long before you got there."

Hey, I have to give him this much: His knowledge of high school science trivia must have worked, because I didn't shoot myself into the core of the sun. Of course, he didn't have any ill intentions when he butted into the conversation. He had this fact collecting dust in his head, and when he heard me make fun of something he liked, using that analogy, he saw his opportunity and took it.

In my experience, I've found that people do this for two reasons: 1) They really, really want to use some otherwise useless fact. It's the hanging curve with the bases loaded that a batter has been waiting on his entire career. 2) They think that adding a level of complexity and "correctness" to a joke makes it somehow funnier. Like they're somehow crushing the joke and making it invalid in hindsight. But in both cases, there's at least a little bit of "Look how incredibly smart I am" that makes you just want to punch their head until hats stop fitting them.

Why We Hate It

If you're one of these people, I desperately need you to understand something: It doesn't make the original joke even slightly funnier. In fact, it sucks all the humor completely out of the conversation, because now everyone is trying to figure out if you have a legitimate medical problem that prevents you from understanding how humans work.

It comes across as you being an unfunny know-it-all cock, regardless of whether or not everyone in the conversation already knew the fact that you decided to jam into the gears of a smoothly running joke. The best jokes are worded very specifically to elicit the biggest reactions. Obviously, if you start adding amendments and asterisks to a simple throwaway one-liner, you sound like you've never fucking spoken to a human before. And when you cut it down to its roots, "actually" is just the short way of saying "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but I do because I'm smarter than you. Allow me to correct your obviously uneducated bullshit."

It's why you spend the first eight years of school being the only kid who can tell who each student is by the smell of their knuckles.

4 Responding to an "I Hate" Joke With That Thing

Sounds Like ...

"Oh my God, if I hear one more person quote that stupid fucking 'Call Me Maybe' song, I'm going to punch them right where their dick is!"

"That is crazy. You should calm down maybe."

Some of you, upon reading about my disdain for the word "actually," went down into the comments section and typed a reply that began with it. Many of you, even after reading this point, will still do it. It's an impulse that's almost impossible to resist -- especially if you're on the Net, safely out of foot-to-crotch distance.

The reason I know that people will still do it is because I watch it happen literally every time someone talks about something they hate.

Why People Do It

For those who don't watch wrestling, years ago Stone Cold Steve Austin started interrupting other stars as they tried to speak by saying "What?" It was the stupidest gimmick in the history of any form of entertainment ... and it ended up becoming the biggest, most popular, most often used crowd chant in all of wrestling. The audience still chants it a fucking decade later, long after Austin left the show. Check out this video of them doing it to R-Truth as he tries to cut a promo, and listen to their reactions when he tells them to knock it off:

Even if you don't watch the video, you know what happened. They yelled it twice as loud and twice as often than they would have if he hadn't responded to them at all. The biggest reason people do it is to elicit a reaction. If they know what you hate, and they do that thing, they get your attention. R-Truth starts speaking in cadence, inserting hard pauses so they know exactly when to yell it out. Listen to them cheer when he gives them the stank eye.

When they're provoking him like that, it makes them a part of what he's doing. They become a foil. Even if it goes as far as putting them in the antagonist role, they're still a part of what he's doing because the audience is now the other half of a battle. It's all about inclusion, and it's the same principle on an individual basis. "I know you hate this, but saying it is the only way you'll notice I'm here. It's either that or throw handfuls of my shit at you ... which honestly is almost the same thing."

Why We Hate It

In a nutshell, it's a predictable, no-thought means of saying "Look at me!" Given the chance to have a genuinely funny exchange with someone about the subject and show your creative side in discussing the thing that the original person is bitching about, you're instead choosing the zero-effort route. It's walking into a room, farting in everyone's faces and then offering them a high-five for how much it made you laugh ... and being genuinely shocked when they elbow you in the throat and throw you outside to vomit blood on the lawn.

3 Explaining the Punchline by Making the Same Goddamn Joke

Sounds Like ...

"If that guy wins the election, I'll be playing hockey and ice fishing by Thursday."

"Yeah, or moving to Canada to get away from him!"

Not every joke I make is about putting my dick in things or demanding that someone lick my asshole. Given, those are some of my favorites, but sometimes a punchline is best delivered with a touch of subtlety. Unfortunately, there are unfathomable masses who can't stand the thought of letting other people get the joke without pointing a giant, flashing, neon, cock-shaped arrow at the punchline and screaming "THIS IS WHAT THE JOKE MEANS! GET IT?!"

Why People Do It

One of my favorite things in the world is fucking with celebrities on Twitter. In fact, the night that Chris Brown ragequit and deleted his account, Ian Fortey and I had been bagging on him for being a woman-beating piece of shit pretty much nonstop for most of a full night.

After hours of prodding, I wrapped it up with a joke that was only subtle in the loosest sense of the term. Meaning that, no, I didn't come right out and say "Here's the punchline!" But it also didn't take much thought to get what I was referring to. Within minutes, someone jumped in to shove a volcano up the ass of even the smallest fragment of an implied insult:

The sarcastic comedian side of me immediately thought "Sincerely, thank you for finishing the joke that I just made. I just stopped at 'beating the fuck out of a dead horse,' but if I had put some thought into it, I could have taken that even further and made a reference to the highly publicized assault and battery of his girlfriend, Rihanna. I wish I had thought of that before I took the 'horse' path."

Now, don't think I'm just picking on that one person. I've since talked to him, and he's genuinely a nice guy who seems to be a good sport about me being a huge asshole and making fun of him. The point is that this happens pretty regularly. Sometimes, people do it because they didn't realize the original joke was actually making the same point without coming right out and saying it point blank. They think the original person just left it out or didn't think of the punchline that they offered in their reply. Other times, they do it because they think the original joke is just too subtle for other people to get. I mean, sure, they got the joke, but what about those other poor bastards who don't possess our nearly supernatural skill to get things? So for the good of society, they spell out the punchline so it slips by no one.

Why We Hate It

Here's the thing, and this is important: The joke is subtle for a reason. The idea of making people think for an extra second or two is the whole reason it's funny. But mostly, the reason we hate it so much is because we see it so goddamn often. Go on any message board anywhere on the Net, and no matter what group mentality or IQ level you find, you will come across one or two dumbasses who prompt another person to respond with "Yes, that was the joke. Good job."

And every time it happens, all the other readers immediately picture those people covered in bees.

2 Any Meme Whatsoever

Sounds Like ...

In Russia, X _______s you! The cake is a lie! But then I took an arrow to the knee! Call me maybe! Not sure if meme or macro. Looks like I'm going to -- puts on sunglasses say a meme -- YEEEEAAAAAHHH! Your grandma just died of a heart medication overdose!

Why People Do It

Not everyone is a comedian. I get that. Hell, not everyone even has a good sense of humor. Of course, everyone thinks they do, because they know that when they hear something funny, they respond with laughter. And because comedy is so subjective, they're bound to laugh at things that not everyone thinks is funny, and vice versa. But when it comes right down to it, not everyone can create comedy, which is why the Internet (and really the world) is about 5 percent comedians and 95 percent people repeating funny things they heard other people say.

They're the ones from the late '80s who did bad imitations of Dana Carvey's bad imitation of George Bush Sr. They yell "GIT ER DONE!" and know every word to the "more cowbell" sketch by heart. The desire to make people laugh is in most people to begin with. In true comedians, this is the driving force that keeps them constantly looking for new things to talk about. They attempt to make people laugh in ways nobody has ever heard before. In the minds of people who rely solely on memes, the desire is there, but the creativity isn't.

Life to them is less about painting something new and more about seeing conversations as jigsaw puzzles that they can plug pre-made jokes into -- even if sometimes they have to force that motherfucker into the slot until the edges fray and the picture starts to peel off of the cardboard. And you have to constantly remind them that they can't eat it.

Why We Hate It

I'll give you this much: Memes become memes because they're usually pretty funny. One person laughs and shows it to another. And that cycle continues until everyone has showed it to everyone else and it's now just getting passed around in an endless loop of Facebook status updates and rolled eyes. It's the same bar joke we've heard a million times. If someone tried to tell you an actual joke with that kind of frequency in real meatspace, you'd throw up a hand and stop them with "Oh yeah, I've heard that one before." And that's after hearing it only once before. The surprise is gone. We know what's coming.

There's a point of saturation that people hit in which they eventually stop laughing for real and switch into a polite fake laugh that's designed to just let you know that they recognize and appreciate your effort to make them laugh. They could literally look at you and say, straight-faced, "I appreciate your effort," and it would send exactly the same message as that laugh. But then after a while, even that fades, and they start daydreaming that you're Greedo and they're Han. And not only did they fire first, but they went through the rest of the bar, shooting everyone else until the memory of your meme was buried under the crushing weight of 50 smoldering tickets to hell.

1 Trading Puns

Sounds Like ...

"Has anyone heard anything about that accident at Sea World this morning?"

"I've read a few things, but the stories sound FISHY."

"Same here, but I got the WATERED DOWN version."

I'm not a Reddit guy, but I have friends who are. One of their biggest complaints is that sometimes they'll find a headline that they'd like to get some more information on, but to get to that, they first have to wade through 200 goddamn puns. For those who don't know how bad a message board pun exchange can be, feel free to read all of this one.

We know all about it on our own forums. It got so bad at one point, we had to make it a bannable offense, because a thread would start off with a legitimate post about a man being eaten by his pet bear, and then end up with five pages of nothing but "I bet his pain was unBEARable!" And ending with the inevitable post that appears in all pun exchanges in which someone pretends that they don't know what puns are and flatly states "A bear ate that guy!" Hell, I'm not innocent -- I've done it myself.

Why People Do It

Quite honestly, it's one of the easiest forms of comedy in existence. Pretty much anyone can do it with virtually no thought or effort, and once someone starts it out, you can just keep it going until the universe collapses and exacts its terrible revenge. Once that exchange gets kick-started, you're a part of something. You're not just repeating jokes you heard someone else say -- you're actually creating comedy! And that's good, right? Creating feels pretty damn awesome.

Why We Hate It

The problem is that it just absolutely fucking wrecks any chance of a conversation in a matter of seconds. Because puns are considered to be one of the lowest forms of wit in existence, most normal humans think of them as dumb jokes made by dumb people. And, yes, I understand that they've been around for as long as spoken language itself, but I'm going to blame Mike Myers for it. Because he happens to be one of the only humans to ever pull off a funny string of puns, mostly because he was clearly making fun of them. But the downside is that it gave birth to an entire generation of meme people repeating "He'll never be the head of a major corporation."

Look, I don't expect everyone to be fine-tuned comedy machines like Kristen Schaal or a second Kristen Schaal. But I see so many people get so much shit for something that is so easily fixable with just a little restraint and a few seconds of extra thought. And I sincerely apologize if I come across as the asshole here, but I see it as a case of if your friend has a booger on his face, you tell him about that shit before he steps out into public. Some of you need to go blow your nose.

Actually, John has a Twitter. And a Facebook fan page, where he regularly tells hilarious Chuck Norris facts. Over 9,000!

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