These wishes are grouped by the number. Does the decade genuinely change what is funny?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt changes nearly everything, because the joke has to match what that particular number feels like from the inside. At thirty the comedy is about arriving: the good frying pan, the early night defended in a group chat, the discovery that arguing with strangers is optional. At forty and fifty it shifts to authority \u2014 the settled opinions, the flawless no thank you, the refusal to sit through things out of politeness. At sixty and seventy the richest material is having been right for decades and no longer bothering to demonstrate it. A line built for a thirtieth reads as faintly patronizing on a seventieth, and a seventieth line on a thirtieth suggests she is somehow finished. Choose the section first, then adjust the wording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In your own words means writing it myself, and I am not a funny person. What do you do then?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nFunny in a birthday message almost never means a joke, and the people who try hardest to write one produce the worst results. What lands is a true statement delivered completely straight, with the comedy sitting in the fact that somebody finally said it. A constructed gag needs a setup, a turn and a punchline, and if any of the three misses there is nothing holding it up. A flat statement cannot fail that way, because even when nobody laughs it is still true and still affectionate. So the method is subtraction rather than invention: write the plainest version of what you think about her, delete every word doing decorative work, put the number in front and stop before the explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She jokes about her own age constantly. Does that mean the rest of us can?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNo, and this is the trap that catches the most people. Self-deprecation is a move only the owner of the subject gets to make; repeated back by somebody else it stops being a shared joke and turns into agreement. When she calls herself ancient she is inviting a contradiction, and a card that cheerfully confirms the diagnosis delivers the exact opposite of what she was fishing for. You can still join in, from the other side: take her part against the number rather than the number’s part against her. If she says she is falling apart, the written answer is that she is the only person in this family who has never once been late for anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Does who you are change which joke you are allowed to make \u2014 a friend, a daughter, a sister?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes, and the difference lies in what you were actually there for. A sister or a friend of thirty years can reference something specific and slightly embarrassing, because being present is what earns the reference and the shared history is half the joke. A daughter has more licence for affectionate mockery than almost anyone, and much less for anything touching on romance, looks, or how her mother was at some earlier point. A colleague has the least room of all: her competence and her standards are fair material, her private life is not, whatever the number. The check is simple. Would the line still work if a stranger read it over her shoulder? Genuine family jokes survive that. Borrowed ones do not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same joke gets a laugh out loud and looks flat on paper. How do you tell which one you are writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nDelivery does the work when you speak, and the sentence has to do it alone when you write. Out loud you can pause, catch her eye and let the room arrive at it, so even a weak line survives. On paper there is no pause: the joke has to be short, the number has to come early, and the strongest word has to be the last one. Anything needing a setup belongs in the spoken version. Anything depending on one precise word belongs in writing, because in a noisy room half the guests will mishear it anyway. A quick test before it goes in a card: read the line aloud completely flatly. If it still works with no performance at all, it is a card line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a particular silence that follows a round number. Everybody knows it is a big one, nobody wants to be the person who says over the hill, and so the group card fills up with have a lovely day written six times in six different pens. That is a waste of a milestone. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":594,"featured_media":6096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3613],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6095","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6099,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6095\/revisions\/6099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6095"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=6095"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=6095"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmonton.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=6095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}