As long as I can remember I've had a thing for deadpan humor. The problem with deadpan humor is that the entire joke is that you're acting serious, which means that if you pull it off well people will not realize you're joking!

This got me into trouble as a kid a lot. I remember being like five years old and staring out the window of our house and then deadpanning "There's a motorcycle gang in the driveway" which I lifted from some newspaper comic somewhere. My parents just about flipped and thought that I'd actually seen something out there.

Things didn't improve as I got older and started to deadpan self-deprecating humor. When I was about 16-17 and in drivers' ed, my mom asked me how it was going. I told her not well and when she asked for details I deadpanned, as a joke, "I dunno, I just run into things." She has yet to let me live it down and insists that when I told her afterwards that it was actually a joke, I was backpedaling.

Anyways this sort of thing happens to me a lot: I make a joke and play it off as serious because I find that funny and then people think I really am serious. I think the internet makes things even worse in that regard, because TEXT!

Does this happen to anyone else? What are some times you've tried to make a joke and it has failed or backfired?