Are You Kidding?!?! Yes, Actually

Our sense of humor is often shaped by the media we surround ourselves with, so, many people often wind up with vastly different ideas of what is funny. This normally isn't an issue, we become friends with people who share our sense of humor and are never the wiser to the negative aspects of our comedy. The problem arises when we insert our sense of humor into media that will be widely available to the public.

Not all humor is subject to this issue, nobody has ever misinterpreted a piece of literature because of a pun or misconstrued a character's intentions due to a dad joke. The area where this danger arises is irony and satire. It is very easy for a reader to misinterpret something that is meant to be joking as a serious remark, ruining the whole point of the passage. There are times when I'm talking to someone and they miss the sarcasm in my voice, imagine how often that happens when it is just text?

While there is no easy fix to this that will make it so the reader understands every piece of irony you put into a piece, there is a way to help it, know your audience. People tend to pick books they will understand or relate to. So don't put a joke about solving differentiable equations in "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" but don't put a joke about highschool in a book obviously aimed at adults because they would have forgotten. We can see this effect in Shakespeare plays, ever notice how most of the humor in Shakespeare plays goes over your head the first time you read it? It's because you weren't the audience he wrote it for, they died 300 years ago. I love you William and your creation of a plot structure that inspired stories for centuries, but your humor kinda sucks now.

Books often get this bad rap for not being as funny as movies or games, but I would disagree. It's just that in order to get the comedy in books, you need to be the right audience. Now if you don't mind me, I'll get back to reading about this scientist in "Candide", he sure does love his experiments.