We’ve uncovered patterns in the data—and now, we turn to lived experience.
Stephen Turban, an entrepreneur turned stand-up comic in Vietnam, knows what it’s like to learn humor across cultures. Raised in the U.S., he now performs in Vietnamese—a language and culture he didn’t grow up with.
"I'd say the biggest barrier for me when learning comedy in Vietnamese was less about language, and it was more about understanding the context of what everyone believes."
To be funny, he says, you need two things: something people haven’t thought of, and something they believe to be true. As a foreigner, the first is easy. The second is much harder.
"There's a lot of things where I think I'm like, that's weird, but actually it's not quite true, because maybe everyone doesn't believe it."
He calls this “perspective-taking”—figuring out what an audience truly believes, then twisting that belief just enough to surprise them.
Turban also highlights one classic technique:
"Deliberate misdirection. This is where you intentionally misunderstand something to create a funny [line]. I did an example, it's like, if you're talking to someone who's like 19, let's say you're talking to a college student and she's 19, and she's dating … a guy, and we have a five year age difference. Then, what you could say would be, which would be kind of funny, if you said something like, wow, so what is it like dating a 14 year old?"
It's unexpected. It's borderline wrong. But it's clear enough to make people laugh.
Even in our data, we saw this pattern: funny captions often break expectations, flirt with absurdity, and twist something real just enough to surprise. In the end, good comedy requires both structure and empathy.
Good captions are short, surprising, and strike a shared truth. Great ones do all three in ten words or less.