Alison muses on whether quoting others’ jokes instead of making up your own is crippling to one’s wit.

Here’s my tangential question: are inside jokes actually funny? Or is the humor simply the giddiness of exclusion? My college best friend/roommate and I used to speak what was almost our own language, a stoner liberal arts patois peppered with weighted nouns like “bane” and multisyllabic forms of the word “dude” that turned into the word into an expressive melismatic opus. Up and then down, ending on a puntuative “… uuude!”

Our language was rapid fire. We reached a point where we could actually speak at the same time and keep track of the conversation.

… we were also intolerable to hang out with. Our own entertainment was at the expense of accessibility. No one knew what the fuck we were saying, and all we talked about were the cool things we did just the two of us. Remember that one trip? That one time? That one day? Oh HA HA HA! That was hilarious. Here, we’ll tell you all about it …

Where-as the joy of sharing a popular culture joke is the inclusion (we can all laugh at public jokes like Paris Hilton and Ted Haggard), the sharing of these inside jokes was less about humor, and more about us laughing at the fact that no-one but us knew how hilarious we were. “Remember that one time in Joshua Tree with the red pen on my finger?” That is not a joke! That’s a shared experience that we could rub in the faces of everyone around us — WE knew what we were talking about, did you?

In this way, inside jokes are less like comedy and more like elitism. But then there’s Andreas and my inside jokes, where one of us will reference something, and we’ll both laugh and then say “What’s that from, anyway? Didn’t you start doing that in 1999 or something? Do you remember why? … me neither.”