You may wonder how TikTok commenters can come up with such funny comments, remarks that would get the attention of a professional comedian. So we went ahead and asked one.
Michael Halcomb is a stand-up comic who also teaches joke writing. According to him, one thing that makes social media comments stand out is their succinctness.
“On TikTok, pretty much nobody's going to read a long comment that feels like a mini-lecture. But EVERYONE will read the short roasts because they're basically mic drop moments,” Halcomb told Bored Panda.
This is a technique called reductive writing, which Halcomb says is primarily about stripping away unnecessary words and syllables. It’s pretty much like cutting out all the fat and getting the remaining meat.
Every joke needs a setup and a punch line. Halcomb says the TikTok videos themselves act as the setups, and all you need to do, as the writer, is to provide the final punch.
“When the setup is already done for you, writing the punchline is a bit easier,” he said.
Comedy is also about disrupting patterns through absurdity, as Halcomb explains. As he noted, TikTok commenters often give the audience a masterclass in pattern disruption.
After people scroll and see the same thing several times, the comment that gets the most attention is the one that disrupts the pattern, often because of its absurdity.
Social media comment sections are apparently built for such comedic banter. As PR strategist and EasyPR Co-founder and CEO Suvrangsou Das explains, these comment boxes encourage “unthought-out answers instead of refinement.”
“Users leave short phrases that layer upwards to produce a common joke that others who are scrolling can see,” he said, noting that readers become more involved rather than being mere spectators, while the comments become the “parallel performance” that accompanies the video itself.
Because structure is less prioritized in social media comment boxes like TikTok, Das says short jokes become more important because of timing. Couple that with absurd phrasing that the audience is already familiar with, and you get a flow of responses.
“Recognized allusions provide foreigners with a common vocabulary, whereas riffing drives the joke on without requiring either ownership or set-up.”
