Sentence examples for explain a joke from inspiring English sources

Of course, to verbally describe a cartoon is to explain a joke, defuse it, ruin it.

(You can almost hear the rush of deflation when someone pauses to explain a joke).

As Charlie Brooker wrote this week, if you explain a joke you spoil it.

But when someone doesn't get the joke or feels offended by it, it's a lose-lose situation, because you can't explain a joke.

As gags go this is pretty mild stuff, but gamers took it so seriously that the publication was forced into the excruciating position of having to explain a joke.

"To explain a joke is a miserable job," Mr. Salem lamented, adding that it reminded him of another joke from the 1960's, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser was in power and suppressed political debate.

He knows exactly when to cut something off, and he never explains a joke.

And the mayor, not for the first time, found himself explaining a joke he had made on a sensitive matter.

Situating Kafka in history can have the unfortunate quality of explaining a joke: even if it doesn't spoil the effect, it still seems mostly beside the point.

As is frequently the case, explaining a joke robs it of its hilarity, so the curious are perhaps better advised to go to nbc.com/30Rock and watch the video of Episode 202, titled "Jack Gets in the Game".

But these efforts, though well intentioned, are a bit like explaining a joke -- if you have to dissect it, it's no longer funny.