Jayus

There are some people who have the knack of telling a funny story. 

They will build their story to perfection, adding layer upon layer, until they bring in the punch line with just the right tone and mood that leaves you in splits. And then you find yourself guffawing, unable to control yourself.

And then there are the others. Folks who couldn’t tell a joke if their lives depended on it.

These are the people who excel at killing a perfectly good joke and turning it into a Jayus, an Indonesian word that describes a joke that is so unfunny (or told so badly) that you just have to laugh.

You would think that a bad joke teller ought to be able to tell when he/she has just told a Jayus.

That the annoyed glances and the strained laughter ought to be a dead giveaway.

But it doesn’t work like that.

These Jayus tellers, for want of a better word, they excel at their craft. These people are where good jokes go to die, and where bad jokes are revived, zombified and served for public consumption.

The best joke can get badly mangled in their hands. The Jayus tellers will tell the joke in the wrong order, often squeezing the punch line between the beginning and the end.

Sometimes they will tell a clichéd Poor Joke, as if they had just made it up, and every other kindergarten aged child wasn’t already aware of it.

Have you ever been guilty of telling a Jayus? What do you do when self-styled humourists unleash their Jayus on you?