Test-Drive Your Jokes on Fellow Humans (On Humor)

A few weeks ago, I tried out a new bit on my girlfriend while we were making dinner. She laughed so hard she dropped the carton of eggs. Naturally, I assumed I had written comedy gold. Two nights later, I told the same joke to a room of 13 people at an open mic.

Silence. Someone in the back coughed politely, which in the South is a disguised, “Bless your heart!”

That gap—between the kitchen and the open mic—taught me something important. A joke is not one fixed thing. It changes shape depending on who is standing in front of it. If you want to know whether your humor writing works, you have to test it on many fellow humans, in as many configurations as you can find. 

Here are seven ways to do that, and what each one will teach you. 

A big group is a strange, forgiving, and terrifying animal. At an open mic once, I tested a story about my first trip to Piggly Wiggly, back when I was still learning English and wrestling with the letter P, which does not exist in Arabic. I confidently asked the cashier where I could find the “Biggly Wiggly sbecial,” and she looked at me like I had asked where they kept the unicorns. At the open mic, that line got a rolling wave of laughter. Test your material on a crowd, and you will learn how a joke performs when it must travel across a room and into many different brains at once.

One-on-one is the opposite experience. With a friend over coffee, I tested this bit about hearing someone say it was “raining cats and dogs” and spending the rest of that afternoon nervously checking the sky for actual falling pets. He did not laugh right away. He squinted and asked, “Wait—you thought what?” That pause told me my setup was too slow; I was explaining the punchline before I had earned it.

Friends will laugh with you before they laugh at your joke, which is both a blessing and a trap. My friend Danny laughs if I simply say the word “hummus” in a certain tone, because he has 20 years of inside jokes stacked behind that one word. That is great for confidence, but dangerous for accuracy. Friends laugh at history, not material. The real test is whether the joke can stand on its own, without 20 years of friendship holding it up.

Strangers are the truth serum. They do not owe you history, loyalty, or eggs dropped in the kitchen. I tested a joke on a stranger about how long it took me to realize that “bless your heart” was not, in fact, a blessing. She laughed, but more importantly, she repeated the phrase back to me with the exact same inflection, which told me the joke had landed cleanly enough to be memorable. If a stranger laughs, you have real information. If a stranger stares at you like you just ordered okra ice cream, you also have real information. 

Family is its own comedy laboratory, mostly because they have front-row seats to the source material. One Thanksgiving, I insisted on carving the turkey to prove I had finally gone full Southern. Two minutes later, it slid cleanoff the platter and onto the floor, where my mother-in-law’s dog happily claimed it as his own. My sister-in-law still brings it up every single year, laughing just as hard as she did the day dinner got away. Family will laugh at truth even when the joke still needs work, which means you must listen past the laughter and ask: Are they laughing at my bit, or at Thanksgiving 2009? 

Every family and friend group has that one person who nods thoughtfully at jokes instead of laughing. Test your material on them, because if you can get a genuine laugh out of someone who treats humor like a tax form, your joke works. I once got my serious brother-in-law to laugh at a line about how Southerners do not get angry, they get “ugly,” as in, “Do not make me get ugly.” He laughed before he could stop himself, then quickly cleared his throat and went back to being serious. That is the tell—when the hardest laugh you get is the one someone tries to take it back. 

Then there are the people who will laugh at almost anything, bless their hearts! These folks are wonderful for morale and terrible for editing. If your light-hearted friend laughs at everything from your best line to your grocery list, you cannot use their laughter as your only measurement. What you can do is watch for the difference in the way they laugh—a genuine, surprised laugh sounds different than a polite one. Learn to hear that difference, and even your most agreeable tester becomes useful. 

Testing your material across a big group, one-on-one, friends, strangers, family, serious and light-hearted people will not just tell you if a joke is funny. It will tell you why and for whom it is funny. A joke that kills with your rowdiest cousin might fall flat with a stranger, and a line that makes a serious coworker crack up might barely register with your easiest audience.  

That range is the whole point.  

Readers, like listeners, come from different backgrounds, different tempers, different tolerances for Arabic vowels stuck onto English words. Test your bit widely, and you will understand how different people might respond once it leaves your hands. 

The next time you write something presumably funny, do not just read it out loud to yourself in the mirror. Find a crowd. Find a stranger. Find your most serious uncle. Then discover if it is funny enough to make your loved one drop the eggs.