I tried to be clever with a girl at a bar last night. It was probably a bad idea.
She didn’t really think I was very clever. I left with beer all over my shirt. Not because she threw it on me, but mostly because I started drinking pretty heavily after she didn’t like my cleverness.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey” she said as she turned her head away from me.
(Staring at the back of her head) “So…” I said to her lovely locks, “How’s that Pert Plus treatin’ you? I hear it does some real damage on the cuticles. Nothin’ a little VO5 can’t take care of, though.”
(She turned her head back around) “What!? We…were you just talking to my hair?”
“Uh…. Well. No. Not really. Well, ok, maybe a little… Come on, I was trying to be funny!”
“Well you weren’t.” (She then stalked over to another table and made out with some fratboy)
Don’t try to be clever. It just doesn’t work. Most of the time when you’re trying to be funny, you end up falling flat on your face and looking stupid. And I don’t mean figuratively. What you should do instead is pretend you’re too cool to acknowledge that you made a bad joke. For example:
(Entering a conversation in the middle) “…and then I said, ‘Doing market research is for the birds!’”
(Laughter all around)
“Yeah,” I jump in. “A dodo bird!”
(Crickets chirping, lots of crickets, a whole mess of crickets)
“Dude,” says someone from the group. “Go away.”
“Yeah? Well. What. Ev. Er. You guys wouldn’t know a good joke if it was on CNN.com. Ha!”
If you walk away really cool, no one will know that they don’t have any jokes on CNN.com. Unless of course you’re talking about Dubya, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.