Antijoke

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A sentence or story that subverts the expectation of a joke, often by being deliberately unfunny or surreal.

    "Thank Christ for Carlton. My secret. My lifeline. The inventor of the antijoke. I kid you not. He postulated a category of things that don't make you laugh which he called the antijoke."

Example

More examples

"Thank Christ for Carlton. My secret. My lifeline. The inventor of the antijoke. I kid you not. He postulated a category of things that don't make you laugh which he called the antijoke."

Etymology

From anti- + joke.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.