Funny dirty stories and jokes to tell your partner

Why innuendo beats saying it

An explicit joke does all the work for the listener. Innuendo makes them do half of it, and people laugh hardest at what they had to work out for themselves. That little jolt of “you did not just say that” is the whole point.

It also means you can tell these at dinner, in front of the waiter, and get away with it. Nobody can prove a thing.

Double meanings

Almost every hobby and job has words that sound worse out of context. Sailing, car repair, accounting, golf: each one is a box of perfectly innocent phrases waiting to be misused by someone with a slightly too warm voice.

Pick a world, write down ten of its everyday phrases, and read them aloud to your partner as if they were compliments. A few to start you off:

• Sailing: “Pull it tight. Tighter. You’re a natural at this.”
• Car repair: “She runs beautifully. She just needs a proper service every few weeks.”
• Camping: “It’s a two-person tent. Technically. Very technically.”
• Accounting: “Bring me everything you’ve got and I’ll go through it line by line.”
• Yoga: “Hold it there. Breathe. Nobody said this would be easy.”
• Golf: “Keep your grip relaxed, and whatever you do, follow through.”

The trick is delivery. Say it perfectly straight, as if you have no idea what you just said, and let your partner be the one who notices.

Misunderstandings

A misunderstanding is a double meaning stretched into a scene. Someone hears half a conversation and fills in the rest, wrongly and with great enthusiasm.

The classic shape is two people doing something completely ordinary, in words that sound like something else, with a third person on the other side of a wall. The comedy lives on the third person’s face. The couple are innocent, and slightly confused about why the neighbor will not meet their eye.

A couple paint their bedroom on a Sunday morning. Through the wall, the neighbor hears: “Slower, you’re getting it everywhere.” “You said you wanted it on the ceiling.” “I said maybe the ceiling.” The next day a card arrives under their door. It says “Good for you both.” They are still trying to work out why.

The setup and the payoff

Every joke has two halves. The setup builds an expectation and the payoff swerves away from it. The straighter the setup, the bigger the swerve feels.

Put the punch word last. “He said he wanted something hot before bed, so I made him cocoa” works. “I made him cocoa because he said he wanted something hot before bed” gives the game away before the end of the sentence.

Keep the setup short: two sentences for a joke, a paragraph for a story. If you need three paragraphs of background, it has stopped being a joke and become a lecture with a punchline stapled on.

Jokes to tell your partner

These are mine, clean enough for most dinner tables and cheeky enough to earn you a look.

• My wife said she likes a man who is good with his hands, so I learned card tricks. It turns out she meant the shelf in the hallway. I can now make the shelf disappear, which is apparently not the same thing.
• My boyfriend asked to see me in something lacy, so I wore the tablecloth. He laughed for ten minutes, then asked if I would wear the matching napkins.
• I married an accountant. Every night at eleven she asks whether I have anything to declare.
• My husband’s personal trainer told him to work on his stamina. So far he has managed to stay awake through an entire film.
• My partner says I am high maintenance. I prefer “classic model”. Classic models need regular servicing, and they are worth every penny.
• She told me to surprise her in the bedroom, so I vacuumed under the bed. She was very surprised. So was I, mostly by what was living down there.

Story setups with a payoff

When a joke wants to be longer, it turns into a story. Each of these is a setup and the line it builds toward. Fill in the middle together, out loud, and see who cracks first.

• A couple book an escape room for their anniversary and stop trying to escape about ten minutes in. The payoff is a tired voice over the speaker: “You have five minutes left. Please at least look at a clue.”
• She rubs his shoulders with what she thinks is massage oil. It is the garlic oil from the kitchen. The payoff: “You smell like dinner.” “That,” she says, “was the plan all along.”
• A wife finds “Carlos, Thursdays, 7pm, bring a towel” in her husband’s calendar. The payoff is that Carlos teaches swimming, and her husband has been learning in secret so he can finally follow her into the sea on holiday.
• A man rehearses a very romantic speech to the bathroom mirror, not knowing his wife is behind the shower curtain. The payoff is that she gives it a seven out of ten, then asks for an encore.

For more starting points sorted by mood, try dirty short stories for two. Most of them work as jokes if you cut straight to the last line.

How to tell it so it lands

• Deadpan. If you laugh first, you have told the listener how to feel, and they will resist on principle.
• Pause before the punch word. Half a second is plenty. A whole second is a speech.
• Never explain. If it misses, move on. Explaining a dirty joke is the least dirty thing a person can do.
• Use your private material. A joke built on your partner’s real habits will always beat one built on a stranger’s.
• Know the room. The tablecloth joke is fine at a dinner party. The accountant one is for the drive home.

If your jokes keep turning into long back-and-forths, you have wandered into banter, and how to write banter covers the rest. When a setup wants a whole chapter of its own, the funny dirty story generator can build one around it.

Questions