Bad Storytellers

Why you annoy me:

• Bad story tellers either: A. Ruin a perfectly good story or B.  Tell completely awful, unfunny stories.
• You ruin good stories by telling events in the incorrect order, usually from saying something and then going, “Actually, before that…”  If you don’t understand how pacing and tempo work when trying to tell a funny or amazing story you shouldn’t tell it.  90% of the population is guilty of this.
• Even more annoying to me are people who try to tell me funny stories only to have the story be decidedly not funny.  I am no master comedian, but I know funny when I see it.  On second thought, I’ll drop the modesty: I am the ultimate judge of humor on the planet.  If I say something is or isn’t funny, that’s the end of the story.  Anyway, it is indescribably annoying when some moron goes, “Dan, OMG, you have to hear this funny story.  OK, we were at the mall and John was talking to this guy and the dude said, ‘Hey-a, what’s going on in Miami?’  OMG!!!  Isn’t that the funniest story, Dan?!  LOL!!!! HAHAHAH!!!!!11oneone.” 
• No, it wasn’t funny.  It was annoying.  You wasted my time telling me about something ridiculously trivial and not in the least humorous.  If you do not have an element of humor, or a punch line, your story doesn’t qualify as funny.  That ties into my point: every single person I know says, “My life is just like Seinfeld, they could make a show about me.”  For a select few, me included of course, that is true.  Sadly, for most it isn’t.  Most unfunny storytellers think that the time they dropped their new cell phone on the subway and it broke is a Seinfeld-esque funny story.  It isn’t.  Seinfeld was funny because it played upon two elements of comedy: irony, and misunderstandings.  If your tale does not contain either of those, it is not Seinfeld-esque, sorry.
• These people tend to have other annoying comedy based personality flaws including, but not limited to, the following:  tells socially inappropriate jokes; still uses Austin Powers quotes and thinks they are funny; likes Dana Carvey or Chris Farley; submits jokes to, or worse yet uses jokes from, Maxim magazines; sends me links to Macromedia Flash based cartoons.

 Possible mitigating factors:

• Sadly, 99% of girls fall into the ‘bad story teller’ category.  In my whole life, I have met two girls who have told me a story that made me laugh uncontrollably.  On the plus side, girls by their very nature have a great many mitigating factors that allow me to forget that they have no sense of story pacing.
• Bad story tellers often tell me stories that while not funny, may be interesting for the information they contain.
• Being a bad story teller in no way is something worth hating someone over, many of my friends can’t tell funny stories and I still associate with them and enjoy their company.  As far as personality flaws go, this is minor and unimportant.  Also, its so common that it isn’t worth discriminating about at all.

Contact me.