How to Make Inside Jokes With Strangers
Founder and Head of Growth, White Label Comedy
It is easy to be funny with your friends and hard to be funny for an audience, and the reason is context. With friends you share inside jokes and a jumping-off point, so the funny responses arrive on their own. You can recreate that with an audience by deliberately building inside jokes around what they all share.
Why jokes are easy with friends, hard online
Sitting around with your mates, jokes just appear. Someone says something, it sparks an idea, you fire back, and everyone laughs. It feels effortless.
Then you open a blank document to write a post, and your brain turns to mush. The problem is not that you cannot tell jokes, because clearly you can. It is that the easy context has gone.
The missing ingredient: a jumping-off point
With friends, you always have something to bounce off. Someone hands you a setup, and you know them well enough to know what will land. That shared history is doing most of the work.
Online you have none of that. It is just you and an empty page, the toughest crowd there is. So the skill is not learning to be funny, it is manufacturing the jumping-off point that your friends give you for free.
How to build inside jokes at scale
You cannot make a private inside joke with each follower individually; that would take forever. What you can do is build inside jokes around what your whole audience has in common: the same frustrations, the same little rituals, the same things only people in their world would get.
Take a specific detail your audience shares, a pain point or an in-group habit, and turn it into a joke that says "we both know this". That shared recognition is what makes a stranger feel like they are in on it, and it is repeatable once you know the pattern.
Meet Brian
Turning what your audience has in common into jokes that feel like an inside joke is exactly the pattern Brian is built on. He is our AI-powered comedy marketing machine, made to help you write content that lands like you have known your audience for years.
Take Brian for a spin and start making inside jokes with strangers.
Adam Hunt
Founder and Head of Growth at White Label Comedy. He spends his days convincing serious brands that funny is the most profitable thing they're not doing.
Your marketing isn’t broken. It’s just boring.
It’s time you met the agency behind the internet’s most profitable funny brands.
Work with us
