It's funny because it's true.

Don’t worry, I’ll try not to ruin the joke.

When you break comedy down to its barest, lamest elements, there are two basic ways to be funny: zag when they think you’ll zig, or beat a dead horse. You take one of those paths and run full-speed until you thwack your face into a branch. Then you do it about a hundred more times, pivoting and tweaking your jokes until you’re seeing stars and you reach that beautiful, adrenaline-fueled moment of clarity: you’re the dead horse no matter which direction you headed. But hey, at least you got a soft exhale out of someone’s nose and an upturned corner of their mouth.

As a copywriter, storyteller and lover of jokes, these two core methods are always on my mind. But I believe there’s one more crucial part of what it means to make people laugh.

There’s something people say so often that we’ve stripped it of all meaning: it’s funny because it’s true. And sure, it may not apply to every form — absurdist comedy and anti-jokes are hilariously untrue — but it illuminates a part of humor I think we’ve lost. It should be true.

The best jokes (in my humble opinion) are the ones that take something we’ve internalized and make it known. That’s why political satire is its own blockbuster genre that’s almost overtaken genuine journalism: because good satire is painfully, consistently true, often in a way that is so much clearer than it has any right to be, and yet still accessible to most people. If it wasn’t so awfully true, it wouldn’t be funny to us.

To that end, there’s a fascinating clip of HBO CEO Richard Plepler vehemently defending John Oliver on CNN, noted Last Week Tonight host who essentially uses his show to do whatever the hell he wants to make a greater point about society. Plepler’s praise, in a nutshell, is this:

I feel this part of storytelling can get lost when we care more about saying the best words than we do about being understood. But the best comedians get this. Even when they’re going on the world’s longest lead-up to a punchline, they keep us engaged by telling us about ourselves in words we didn’t know could be used that way. Drawing on human truth is the very core of humor, whether we are self-deprecating, making memes that copy better jokes or exaggerating the silliest parts of what it means to be alive here and now.

Why do we prefer “punching up” instead of “punching down”? That’s because one is true — highlighting real-life conflicts between the oppressor and oppressed — and one is a bad imitation of systemic pain by those who never felt it.

“Beating a dead horse” is funny because it’s a million ways to say the same true thing, adding truth to truth until you’re breathlessly giggling because you’re right, people are just so freakin’ weird. (Watch any Letterkenny episode and you’ll see what I mean.)

And in the other direction, zagging when people think you’ll zig is just building something unexpected on top of an established truth.

It’s the schadenfreude of Jon Stewart verbally obliterating Crossfire live on air. It’s the thrill of watching Ziwe’s insanely sharp wit forcing her guests into brutal honesty. It’s how Hasan Minhaj can breeze over ten back-to-back killer punchlines, then stop you in your tracks by unpacking generational trauma as the child of immigrants. True comedy is not only the white guys in basement clubs or whatever they do on Saturday Night Live anymore. It’s real life via funhouse mirror. It’s not wrong or manipulated, but reflected back to us in a lens that makes us realize being human is weird as hell all the time.

The best part is that comedy, good or bad, reminds us to appreciate our built-in BS filters. We know, in our guts, when someone is being authentic. Sure, personal truths and experiences are subjective and confirmation bias affects everyone, but we all know what a really bad joke looks like. It falls flat for the same reason that bad advertising gets torn to shreds on Twitter: it feels false. It has nothing new or interesting to say about anything at all. It may even be pure hatred — we can’t ignore how racism, sexism, and homophobia have been the basis of “”comedy”” for centuries — wrapped in a flimsy “I’m kidding, take a joke” excuse.

That’s why truth and authenticity in comedy is, perhaps, crucial: if we don’t appreciate human truth when we see it, we might lose our grip on it. When we blindly agree that “satire” is just whatever some random guy says to get out of being held accountable, people can use “it’s funny because it’s true” as a weapon to uphold stereotypes and superiority complexes, when it should be doing the opposite.

I propose we take this saying away from those who just want free reign to be horrible and start using it as a standard by which we measure great jokes. As much as we use the positive, we should also use the negative when needed: you’re not funny because that’s not true. (Because sadly, some comedians care more that we think they’re funny than if we think they’re perpetuating hateful violent rhetoric.)

I say this not to ruin comedy for the rest of your life, but in hopes that you’ll appreciate it more knowing it can have real value. Because even if nothing else in life feels honest, you know that when you tell or hear a particularly good joke, you’ve found something real.