The short answer:

To get to the other side![1]

The long answer:

(As forewarning, this is a very dry post.[2])

I typically do not like it when someone says that I have a very dry sense of humor. The reason is not that I think that it’s an inaccurate statement or that I don’t have respect for dry humor or dry wit. It’s because in the United States, the word “dry,” especially when preceded by a hesitation, is often used by critics of dry humor as a polite euphemism for “nonexistent” or “better left unsaid,” as in, “Yes, you have a very, um, dry sense of humor.”

Many people do not understand the concept of dry humor. While I don’t think that everyone has to enjoy every type of humor, one should at least be able to understand why different types of humor are funny. You may not enjoy slapstick, but you probably understand why someone slipping on a banana peel might appear funny to some people. But often with dry humor, the comedy can be completely lost. Therefore, in this post I will attempt to explain what dry humor is. (Obviously I will deal mainly with written or verbal humor rather than visual humor.)

You may have noticed that this post is not very funny. This is intentional. The reason is that a key to understanding dry humor is detecting what is funny and what is not. Therefore, I will be annotating this post to point out any and all bits of humor; any sentence that contains anything remotely funny will end with one of these handy footnotes:[3]

So what is dry humor? It is a form of humor in which part of the funniness stems from the fact that it can be mistaken for something that isn’t funny. This can be for one of several reasons:

  1. It can be sarcastic or ironic. This is when someone says something when they really mean the opposite. (Sarcasm is generally more incisive than irony.) Usually the only indication that the opposite is meant is intonation or the fact that the statement taken literally is clearly incorrect. Since it is one of the most common forms of dry humor, I’m sure you will have no trouble at all in identifying this sentence as sarcastic.[4]
  2. It can use wordplay. Typically these rely on words having more than one meaning (so-called double entendres), being related to one another in pronunciation or spelling, or occurring in certain idioms. Since they often require some mastery of the language, it can be difficult to find a satisfying piece of wordplay. So if you think I can’t come up with a good example for this post, you’re right, for now at least. But rest assured, I’ll think of something, so count on me to make a repost later.[5]
  3. It can leave unstated an assumption without which the situation does not make sense. This can be the most difficult type of dry humor to understand because it requires the crucial inference, which should always be natural but may not be obvious. The more difficult the inference, the drier the humor is said to be. (The driest humor makes no sense to anyone other than the person who utters it, in which case one might argue that the critics of such humor are correct.)

[6]

While much of dry humor falls into one of these three categories, this list is certainly not definitive. However, I hope that it gives enough of an introduction to instill an appropriate appreciation of the subject.

In case it has not, let me just say that the appeal of dry humor is that it is typically subtle and understated, which makes discovering it much more gratifying than many other types of humor. It is perhaps for this reason that it is quite popular in some places, most notably Great Britain (although they spell it “dry humour”). And while this popularity has sadly yet to cross the Atlantic, I hope that by spreading some awareness of the subject, we can give it a reason to do so.[7]

Cheers,
-qm

[1] This is the punchline to the well known joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” The humor lies in the fact that while this punchline does not directly answer the question of what dry humor is, the referenced joke is perhaps the most famous example of dry humor, as explained in a previous post. Moreover, in response to the question “What is dry humor?”, the answer is unexpected because it is a non sequitur, whereas in the original joke, it is unexpected because it is the obvious or expected answer. Therefore its use here contains an additional level of irony.

[2] The use of the word “dry” here is a double entendre. On the one hand, this sentence is warning that the post below is dry because it is very boring. On the other hand, it is dry in the sense of dry humor because that is the subject matter.

[3] Often humor becomes less funny when you explain it, because part of the joy comes from discovering unexpected connections and references on one’s own. Therefore the very idea of explaining why everything in this post is funny is, in itself, funny. Another reason this sentence is funny is that the terminating colon suggests that the footnote marker is only given as an example of what a footnote looks like, when in fact it is also there because the sentence is inherently humorous. Finally, this sentence contains a subtle pun: can a foot-note really be hand-y?

[4] This sentence is sarcastic, but not obviously so. The reason is that at first glance, it might appear to be obviously sarcastic: for instance, it uses the phrase “I’m sure,” which is often an indicator of sarcasm, and it lies in the paragraph about sarcasm, which would be a natural place to put a sentence that utilizes sarcasm. But since this is so obvious, surely most readers had no trouble in guessing that this sentence was supposed to be sarcastic. But then the literal statement of the sentence is true, which runs counter to it being sarcasm. Therefore, the reader may begin to question whether this sentence is really sarcastic. As a result, the reader has had some trouble in determining whether the sentence is sarcastic. But this is the opposite of the literal meaning of the sentence, which means that the sentence is sarcastic.

[5] This is a pun on the words “repost,” meaning another post, and “riposte,” meaning a verbal retort.

[6] The assumption is that, as in the previous two paragraphs, this paragraph would end with an example of the humor described within. However, in this case, such humor would be so dry that it would not be funny to anyone except me, and therefore the critics would be correct in calling it “dry” as in “nonexistent” or “better left unsaid,” as described in the first paragraph. Thus I decided to seemingly acquiesce to their wishes and end the paragraph without including the example. Of course, by doing so, I did end the paragraph with some extremely dry humor that probably no one reading this finds funny.

[7] That reason, of course, is to get to the other side! [8]

[8] This is funny because “To get to the other side!” was listed as the short answer to the original question, and its reappearance here at the end of another post as the dry answer to yet another question is unexpected. [9]

[9] This footnote is funny because it is a footnote about a sentence in a footnote. [9][10]

[10] This footnote is funny because not only is the footnote referenced twice, but it is also self-referential. [10][11]

[11] This is no longer funny.

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