40th birthday jokes

Age Eraser

40th birthday jokes

One of the best stories about good turning 40 jokes that we have ever heard happened among a bunch of teens and young adults. 40th birthday jokes seem especially funny to the younger set because 40 seems so far away for them. Riddles abound as they tried to puzzle out life’s meaning, believing youth to be eternal (and more than likely thinking that they actually had the answers for all riddles) and 40 to be unattainable.

At any rate, this bunch of youngsters sat down to brainstorm 40th birthday jokes, trying to determine how best to ensure that they got the most mileage out of them. Having heard that the best jokes were short jokes, and the best short jokes ever were rude short jokes, they set to work. After the first meeting—brief, just like a good joke—they continued the process through email. See, their object was this: somebody was turning 40. Without any turning 40 jokes, this person might have thought that 40 was just another birthday. Because most of the youngsters had parents older than 40, they knew the value of good laughs at clever riddles. With this friend approaching 40, this group determined to arm themselves with the best rude short jokes to make all other 40th birthday jokes pale in comparison.

Unfortunately, writing good turning 40 jokes was harder than it sounds. After debating plays on “ten-four” and “four-oh,” “over the hill,” and “mid-life crisis,” they realized that rude short jokes couldn’t be thought up in a day, or even in a few days over email. Good jokes take time to incubate. With double misfortune for our young friends, the 40th birthday was approaching faster than the 40th birthday jokes. They were starting to run out of options.

Suddenly, one of the young men hit on the idea of brainstorming riddles. Rude short jokes, though absolutely ingenious, were slow in coming. The best short jokes ever had already been told and other good turning 40 jokes were, though good, few to be had (at least, among their young brains). Believing themselves still to have intellectual mastery over the 40 year old who they planned to ridicule, they brainstormed riddles. Their favorite, the flagship of their 40th birthday jokes’ arsenal, was this:

“A young man walking swiftly feels that his step begins to slow down. He feels tired and realizes that his feet don’t have to reach as far to the ground. He starts to run out of breath—and then suddenly, his stride lengthens, only this isn’t like the run he was making before. This is helter-skelter rough-and-tumble barely-keeping-his-feet death-is-certain near-freefall! What happened to him?”

The answer? “Well, after a pretty crazy 39 year-long climb, he’s over the hill!” When the opportunity came to share this and other riddles, laughs were had, cake was cut (cake that nearly set the house on fire with its 40 candles), and sides were split by countless 40th birthday jokes. The rude short jokes were a great way to start, but a good short riddle always followed them up. After all, when the answers for all riddles are all about laughter, even turning 40 became quite the merry time.

Me old? Prove it!

Rude Short Jokes

Good turning 40 jokes are hard to come by. More often than not, riddles about people’s ages are lame, uncouth, and absolutely pointless in social settings. When it comes to finding good turning 40 jokes, you have to know what you are looking for and how to get it. To do this, you have to look at the anatomy of a good joke.

To start off with, good jokes (especially 40th birthday jokes) need to involve a little bit of an intellectual play on the theme. Nobody will laugh at any jokes unless there is something that makes them think and tickles their funny bone. Long jokes are often good for this. The best long jokes, though, only turn out if the person telling them is a gifted storyteller. For this reason, the best jokes are short jokes. Anybody can tell a good short joke and the best short jokes ever leave a punch that sticks in the brain and the diaphragm (after all, if the joke sticks in the diaphragm, the laughs will keep coming).

Enough about your anatomy, though—we want the anatomy of a good joke. So far, we’ve discovered that a good joke needs to be short; good turning 40 jokes, then, need to be short. As well, though, you have to avoid the lameness inherent in some of these. To get a good round of 40th birthday jokes, you can’t just rattle off the first pun that comes to your head. Puns are funny creatures. When they form the basis for riddles, they serve a valuable purpose. The answers for all riddles almost always include a bit of a play on words; in this way, the short nature of good riddles and the punny nature of the answer combine to make a very effective (and humorously affecting) puzzle. However, puns on their own are far from being the best short jokes. Ever slapping a sarcastic knee but never getting a genuine laugh, puns have their place—and believe us, it is not among good 40th birthday jokes.

Rude short jokes (frequently about anatomy), unlike puns, often help reveal the anatomy of a good 40th birthday joke. Rude long jokes owe more in their payoff to their length rather than to their effect. Having good rude short jokes means knowing how far to trust your audience and how to keep crass and comic in separate categories. Because turning 40 jokes so often involve an understanding that the 40 year old victim of the jokes is experiencing a series of failings (to various degrees) in various body parts, functions, and hormones, rude short jokes, though almost the norm, need a fresh and clever side to keep the laughs coming. Rude short jokes are funny when your audience finds them funny; keep that in mind.

In discussing the anatomy of good 40th birthday jokes, we have found a series of requirements. They need an intellectual play (such as a riddle—and remember, the answers for all riddles must be funny), they need to be short (some of the best short jokes ever are probably about turning 40), and always remember that rude short jokes can fit the bill if they are used carefully.

Old Enough, Yet Young Enough

Turning 40 Jokes

40th birthday jokes are best for the men in our lives. We don’t want to exclude women from the fun—after all, there’s plenty to be said about women turning 40 that is worthy of some good jokes—but let’s think about it this way. Your mom—she’d like to think she’s still 29, right? Or your aunt? Grandmothers sometimes seem to have given in, but they’re too far from 40 for the subject anyway. Maybe a girlfriend or a sister—whoever it is, you know the woman who pretends that time stopped at 29. Or 21. When it comes to the men in your life, however, you know that while they’d like to think that time stopped for them, too, they know it’s taken 40 years of work to get that gut. That’s why good turning 40 jokes have to at least be started on men, before any other steps are taken.

Good turning 40 jokes avoid groans and grimaces by making the payoff quick, painless, and funny. Again, back to those men—how many of them channel surf? Or change the topic far before you are through with it? That short attention span means that if somebody turning 40 is going to dedicate a chunk of their time to hearing out any number of turning 40 jokes, telling a long one with a lame payoff gives you double the groans than it otherwise would. Turning 40 seems to make a man think he’s busy with his family, job, and whatever else; one of the riddles that he will never solve (though he probably claims to have the answers for all riddles), however, is how his infatuation with the TV (or some other entertainment device) probably accounts for all of that lost time. But the point of that is this: good short jokes are easier to craft than good long jokes and bad long jokes hurt far more than bad short jokes. Clever riddles help, too, but most men want an instant payoff (especially at 40, when fewer and fewer things respond instantaneously).

Rude short jokes make the 40 year old man smile. If you hammer him with turning 40 jokes, even good turning 40 jokes, he’ll eventually wear down. 40th birthday jokes have a very short shelf life. Tell them too early, and they become annoying jokes. Tell them too late, and they lose any impact, even if they are among the best short jokes ever. Tell them too long, and it’s the same as before: even the best short jokes ever eventually become the bane of being. Focusing on rude short jokes, however, allows your 40 year old friend to feel fit and alive again. They can believe that because they can laugh about rude things, they can do rude things. Whether that’s throwing food across the table or sticking out their tongue, you can leave those ruder sorts of riddles to be puzzled out by the joke inventors. So long as your jokes aren’t so bad that they throw food or stick their tongue out at you, you know that you’re on to something. 40th birthday jokes, ultimately, are only as good as the 40th birthday. Rude short jokes, though, will always be among the best short jokes ever—for the men in your life, anyway.

The End