It's Just A Joke
A Systems Mind Walks Into A Bar...
Somewhere in my childhood bedroom, there was a binder. Who am I kidding, I knew exactly where the binder was. But this was no ordinary binder, no. It wasn’t a homework binder or a sports card binder. It was a binder full of jokes — collected, organized, and studied with the same forensic attention I gave to everything else that confused me about being human. Made up of knock-knocks, one-liners, blonde jokes, and puns. I treated it less like a comedy collection and more like a foreign language textbook. Because that’s exactly what humor was to me at the time: a language everyone around me was born speaking which I apparently missed orientation for. The binder did not solve the problem. I want to be transparent about that upfront. But it is where the story starts, so here we go.
The Problem With Everyone Else’s Jokes
The humor that surrounded me growing up was slapstick. Someone slips, everyone laughs. Someone gets hit in the face with something, everyone laughs harder. The joke and the punchline were the same object, and the laugh was simply the sound a room made when it fell over. I didn’t not laugh. I performed the laugh. Which, if you’ve ever performed a laugh while not finding something funny, you know is its own low-grade misery — less comedy, more anthropology fieldwork conducted in real time on a room full of people who appear to be malfunctioning.
What genuinely baffled me was the mechanism. There was no architecture to it. No second layer. No moment where something true revealed itself at an unexpected angle. The information content of a man slipping on a banana peel is precisely zero, and yet apparently this is the height of comedy, and I was the odd one for not feeling it.
I compiled the binder the way a systems mind compiles anything: methodically, with the grim efficiency of someone who suspects the answer is in there somewhere if they just look hard enough. I shared some of these jokes with classmates and with teachers. I was told, more than once, with the particular confidence of people who have never doubted their own taste: “these just aren’t funny.” I briefly considered that I had a learning disability around humor. I now understand I had the opposite problem. But we’ll get there.
What My Body Knew First
Tucked inside that binder were the wordplay jokes, the puns, the ones that worked on two levels simultaneously, where the second reading arrived half a second after the first and quietly recontextualized everything. Those didn’t need decoding. My body just reacted.
Before I’d finished reading, something would land in my chest, small, involuntary, like a feather drawn across the chin. Not a laugh yet. More like the body’s version of “Oh.” And then the brain would catch up, fully process what had just happened, and the laugh would arrive late and disproportionately loud. The delayed recognition made it funnier, not less. The brain arriving late to its own party and finding the joke had already started without it — that gap was part of the pleasure.
What I didn’t understand yet was that my body had already developed its own taste in humor long before I had the language for it. It liked construction. It liked layers. It liked the joke that required you to be paying attention, because the reward was proportional to the attention you brought. I was not broken. I was just operating at a frequency that didn’t have a lot of traffic on it.
The Performance Years Or “Faking It Was Its Own Joke”
By high school I had hidden the binder and learned to perform. I studied timing. I mirrored reactions. I catalogued what got laughs the same way I’d catalogued the jokes themselves, with the focused energy of someone auditing a system they didn’t build and don’t fully understand. It worked. I became socially legible. I was liked.
The unsettling part wasn’t that it worked. The unsettling part was that no one noticed it was a performance. They couldn’t tell the difference between my genuine reaction and my performed one. Which is either a comment on my acting ability or a comment on how closely they were paying attention. Possibly both. I’ll leave that unresolved.
There’s a particular brand of humor I cannot perform and have stopped trying to — the belligerent kind — the kind that gets its energy from embarrassing someone, from aggression dressed as wit, or from making a room laugh at someone rather than with them. That brand doesn’t just not land for me. It lands wrong. It grates like a Brillo pad on sunburned skin; which, if you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you’ll recognize as my preferred unit of measurement for things that are both specific and unpleasant. There’s no architecture in cruel humor. The laugh it produces is just the sound a room makes when someone flinches.
What My Humor Actually Is
My humor comes from The Narrator. If you’ve read Beauty and The Narrator, you know The Narrator is my internal voice which documents everything with forensic precision. He tracks tone, posture, word choice, and the specific weight of a silence. It runs constantly. It narrates me getting out of bed. It narrates me making tea. It would narrate the tea if I let it.
Humor, for me, is what happens when The Narrator catches something absurd and decides to say it out loud instead of just filing it away. The aside. The deadpan parenthetical. The observation delivered at normal conversational volume while something slightly unhinged is happening in the background. No setup. No announcement. Just the thing, noted, released, and I’ve already moved on.
Jimmy Carr is the clearest public example, not shock comedy, but construction. The setup is architectural, the punchline inevitable once you see the angle, except most didn’t see the angle coming. A precision instrument deployed at conversational speed.
Then there’s Matt Berry. He is committed absurdism, delivered with the serene confidence of a man who has never once doubted whether his thoughts are worth having. Berry requires a specific readiness to receive. Some days The Narrator is too operational for him. But when the conditions are right, he is devastating.
And finally there is the TV show Silicon Valley. One scene in particular. Engineers, a hotel room, a whiteboard, a mathematical algorithm for a problem I will not describe in full, but which involves human anatomy and an optimization process of considerable absurdity and yet presented with the full earnestness of a product launch. Complete with variables, charts, and utter methodological commitment. The Narrator, fully deployed, on something completely unhinged. The precision applied to the absurdity is the joke. The whiteboard is the joke. The fact that they finished the algorithm is the joke. If you understand why that’s funny, we’re probably going to get along.
The more layers, the funnier. A joke working on one level is pleasant. A joke working on three, where each reading reveals something new and where the construction itself is part of what you’re laughing at, is the kind of thing that makes me laugh until I can’t breathe while everyone around me stares. Which, I have come to accept, is simply what this looks like from the outside.
The Filter Dichotomy
Here’s the thing about humor requiring people to pay attention: it filters for people who are paying attention. When my best friend catches something I say, not a setup, just an aside, a thing The Narrator noticed and released, and he laughs before I’ve finished the sentence, I know we’re on the same register. Most people only laugh at jokes which announce themselves. The ones who catch the unmarked ones are operating at a different level of presence, and finding those people is, quietly and without ceremony, one of the better things that can happen to you.
I spent years thinking my humor was broken because it didn’t land in large rooms. What I was actually doing, without knowing it, was running involuntary compatibility detection. The joke doesn’t fail when the room doesn’t laugh. The joke succeeds when the right person does. The binder wasn’t evidence of a deficiency. It was a systems mind doing what it always does when it encounters something it doesn’t understand: study it until it yields. Humor didn’t yield. It just eventually showed me which frequency was mine. I’ve stopped apologizing for it.
— Jeff
Note:
To my daughter: the dad jokes are coming. They are structural and non-negotiable. I have spent much of my life studying humor and this is apparently where it ends up. I hope your embarrassment is brief and your timing is good. If you catch one before you mean to, that’s your frequency saying hello. ;-)