You Don't Have to Be Funny: Social Media Without the Jokes
The funniest accounts go viral, so it's easy to believe humour is the price of admission to social media — but that's survivorship bias doing the talking. Here's why warmth, specificity and sounding like yourself outperform forced jokes for small businesses, and what to post instead.
Dave Smith
# You Don't Have to Be Funny: Why Humour Isn't a Social Media Requirement
There's a belief floating around that social media success belongs to the funny ones. The bakery with the razor-sharp meme game. The plumber whose captions read like stand-up material. Scroll through any "best brand accounts" roundup and it's wall-to-wall wit, so it's easy to conclude that if you can't be funny online, you shouldn't bother being online at all.
It's nonsense. And it's quietly stopping a lot of good businesses from posting anything.
Where the myth comes from
The funny accounts are the ones that go viral, so they're the ones you see. That's survivorship bias doing its thing. Nobody shares a screenshot of a joinery firm calmly explaining how to spot rotten window frames — but thousands of those posts are out there working perfectly well, bringing in enquiries, building trust, doing the job social media is actually supposed to do.
Meanwhile, the viral joke from the big-name brand? It was probably written by an agency team, workshopped in a Slack channel, and signed off by three people. You're comparing your Tuesday evening caption to a professional comedy writers' room. Of course it feels like you're falling short.
There's also a British complication here. We rate humour highly as a culture — being called funny is practically a knighthood — so admitting "I'm not funny online" feels like admitting something worse. But being funny in the pub and being funny in writing, on demand, in a caption, are completely different skills. Plenty of genuinely hilarious people write captions that land flat. It's not a character flaw. It's just a different medium.
What actually earns attention
Think about the businesses you follow and actually buy from. Chances are most of them aren't comedians. They're accounts that are *useful*, or *warm*, or *knowledgeable*, or just *reassuringly human*. Those qualities build the thing humour is only ever a shortcut to: familiarity and trust.
A joke earns a laugh and a scroll onwards. A post that answers the exact question a customer was about to ring you about earns a saved post, a share to their partner, and quite possibly a booking. If you're choosing what to be known for, "the ones who clearly know their stuff" beats "the ones who are sometimes a bit funny" every single time.
Research on why people follow small businesses backs this up: the top reasons are wanting updates, offers, and a sense of who they'd be dealing with. "Entertain me" is on the list, but it's nowhere near the top — and even then, entertaining doesn't mean jokes. A satisfying before-and-after is entertaining. A time-lapse of a cake being iced is entertaining. Nobody needed a punchline.
Forced humour is worse than none
Here's the part that should actually worry you: humour that doesn't fit is more damaging than humour that's absent. Everyone can smell a business straining to be funny — the meme format that was everywhere eight months ago, the "hilarious" pun that needed a sit-down explanation, the awkward trending-audio video that made the whole team visibly uncomfortable.
Customers don't think "well, at least they tried." They think "this doesn't feel like them," and that tiny mismatch chips away at the trust every other post has been building. If your business is calm, precise and reassuring in person — say you're an accountant, a funeral director, a physiotherapist — then calm, precise and reassuring is exactly what your social media should be. That's not boring. That's *consistent*, and consistency is what people are quietly checking for when they look you up.
What to aim for instead
If humour isn't your lane, here's what works just as hard:
Be specific. "We repointed this chimney before the weather turned" beats a generic joke about Mondays every time. Specific posts prove competence; jokes only prove you've seen the same memes as everyone else.
Be warm. Warmth is humour's quieter sibling and nobody's bad at it. Thank a customer. Mention the dog that supervised the job. Sign off like a human being.
Be observant. You don't need punchlines when you've got details. The strange requests, the satisfying moments, the things customers always say — noticing is 90% of what makes the funny accounts good anyway. You can serve the observation without the gag.
Let the funny things be funny on their own. If something genuinely amusing happens — and in any customer-facing business, it will — just tell it straight. "A customer asked if we could match the paint to her cat. We could. Here's the cat." No jokes required. The situation does the work.
And if a bit of dry wit does creep into your captions naturally, brilliant — keep it. The point isn't that humour is bad. It's that it's optional, and it was never the ingredient doing the heavy lifting.
Post like yourself
The businesses that win on social media aren't the funniest. They're the ones who show up sounding like themselves, week after week, until choosing them feels obvious. If yourself happens to be funny, lovely. If yourself is thoughtful, thorough and straight-talking, that's every bit as followable — and considerably easier to keep up.
This is exactly why Aunty Social builds a tone of voice profile for each business before writing a word — sliding scales, not a comedy setting — so your posts sound like you on your best day, not a brand doing a bit.
Stop waiting to think of something funny. Post the useful thing, the warm thing, the true thing. That's the whole job.