The Joke Trick That Lets You Tease Without Offending

Every joke makes fun of a target, which is exactly why brands are nervous about telling them: what if the audience feels got at? There is a simple trick that removes the risk. Build the joke so that everyone assumes the target is someone else, and nobody feels attacked. Done right, even the people being gently satirised laugh along, because they think you mean the other lot.

Every joke has an in-group and an out-group

Whenever you tell a joke, you create two groups. The in-group is the people you want laughing along with you. The out-group is whoever, or whatever, the joke is aimed at. Brands get scared because they worry their own audience will land in the out-group and take offence.

That fear is what keeps most brands bland. They avoid any joke with a target, which means avoiding almost all jokes, and end up with content nobody remembers. But you do not have to choose between funny and safe. You just have to control who feels like the target.

The trick: make everyone think it is someone else

Here is the mechanism, using a classic example. Make a joke about "the posh kid at university", and almost everyone laughs, including posh people. Why? Because no matter how posh someone is, they can always picture someone posher. So they assume the joke is about that person, not them.

That is the trick. Build the joke around a trait where everyone believes there is always someone further along the scale than they are. Then each reader mentally casts someone else as the target, laughs freely, and never suspects the joke might include them. You get a shared laugh with no casualties.

How to use it in your content

To apply this, pick targets that are relative rather than absolute. Instead of aiming at a specific type of person your audience might belong to, aim at "the extreme version" of a behaviour, the one everyone thinks applies to somebody else.

The person who is always on their phone, the colleague who over-complicates everything, the rival who takes it all too seriously: your audience will nod, picture someone they know, and laugh, safe in the belief that it is not about them. Get the target ambiguous in the right way and you can tease, satirise and poke fun all day long, and every reader stays firmly in the in-group.

Meet Brian

Building jokes with the target aimed so that everyone laughs and nobody feels got at is exactly what Brian is for. He is our AI-powered comedy marketing machine, built to keep your comedy sharp and safe.

Take Brian for a spin and tease without the risk.