It's a funny story...or is it?

I have often said that I'm a card-carrying member of the "Nothing Sacred" school of humor. This isn't technically true, as there is no official school so named, nor do I actually carry any such membership card.
However, I like the idea of creating some cards, and giving them out to fellow members. It's kind of like the "school of life" or "school of hard knocks;" it may not be a real place, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from it.

The "Nothing Sacred" school of humor is built on a foundation of the following four rules:

1. Timing is everything. Any comedian will tell you this is true. If you tell a joke to quickly, too slowly, or even mess up the rhythm of the joke, its humor can be lost. You have then killed a perfectly good (or wonderfully bad) joke.

2. If you have to explain it, it's not funny. Have you ever told a joke, and it totally fell flat? No reaction from your audience, save the distant sound of crickets chirping and a lone tumbleweed drifting down a nearby road? Looks like that joke died, too. Don't try to resuscitate it by explaining why it's funny; you're just kicking the corpse. If you killed the joke, odds are it was lame anyway, and had to be put out of its misery. (Yes, I just compared jokes to horses. Ha! Beating a dead horse! Get it? Get it?)

3. Play to your audience. What is funny to one person may not be funny to another. A joke that gets full gut-laughs from your best friend may get a confused look from a family member, or may cause offense in someone you work with. Unemployment is rarely funny; even less so when it happens to you. With humor, one size definitely does not fit all.

4. Everything is fair game. George Carlin put it best when he said "I believe you can joke about anything; it's all in how you construct the joke." There is no topic you cannot turn into humor in some way or another. The trick is finding the right way to tell the joke, and the right person to tell it to. And don't let anybody censor you; that way lies the path of cutesy, milquetoast family fare that is only amusing to Ned Flanders. It's a slippery slope that has killed many comedic careers. Filter yourself, yes; but do not censor yourself. Either everything is acceptable to be joked about, or nothing is.

With these simple rules, it's not that hard to be funny. I'd like to get them printed up onto cards; then I could actually be a "card-carrying member."