Sentence examples for explaining a joke from inspiring English sources

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.

For instance: you see the 800+ words that preceded this sentence, overly explaining a joke out to the point that the joke is no longer funny anymore?

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).

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

You can't explain a joke with a joke, because that would lead to an infinite regress in which each joke would have to be explained by another joke, eventually using up all the jokes in the world, leaving us with a very sad planet, and with one damn joke still left to be explained.