The Anti-Joke

Inside jokes, if you think about it, really aren't that funny.

The memory of how they came about was funny, but the jokes themselves… Well, they're nothing special. How do I know this? Easy. Go ahead and tell someone (who isn't on the inside) and inside joke and see if they laugh.

They wont laugh.

It's because it's not funny.

However, it does make you and your friends laugh, and the more time passes, the funnier it will get. This is not only increased by letting more people in on the joke and having it effective "ripple" out into the laughter-craved masses, but also because the longer the joke goes on the more it is reinforced as being absolutely hilarious.

Normal jokes, on the other hand, are hilarious at first- think about your reaction to a hilarious joke and then compare that to your reaction to the same joke after two hundred repeats- but lose comedic value with age. This is illustrated simply in this chart:



Note how the inside joke acts completely opposite to the regular joke? This can lead me to only one conclusion.

Inside jokes are the anti-joke.

The one exception are when regular jokes are told over and over, again and again, so much, infect, that they become an inside joke. This phenomenon is called JTS which stands for Joke Transformation Syndrome, and has been drawn out for your aesthetic pleasure below:



Note how the joke decreases in hilarity, up until the point when everyone gets "in" on the joke and suddenly it becomes much, much funnier?

That there is JTS.