When you have a lot of shared experiences with a group of friends it is practically unavoidable that you will create inside jokes with them. An inside joke can be anything from calling a goofy action or a mistake by someone’s name, or making eye contact with one of those friends and laughing when a certain word or phrase is said. They are often created unintentionally, and you don’t realize they’re there until someone references it. These are among the best things you can have with other people, but as with all good things there are a couple of downsides.
Starting off with why they’re great, the primary reason is that they help to solidify the connection you have with the people who you share it with. Nothing says you’re friends with someone like constantly remembering all the silly or crazy things that you’ve done together. Not only that, but we all have at least one person with whom you can laugh at almost anything because of all the different things that you can apply to the situation, and these people are usually the ones who you would consider to be your best friends. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone, as some people don’t bond over the things they can laugh about, but those things are a good baseline.
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Inside jokes are also good because they provide you with a way to communicate in indirect ways with your friends. For whatever reason, if you don’t feel comfortable saying exactly what you want to, inside jokes and references provide you with a toolbox of potential things that you can use that your friends will understand but the people who you don’t want to will not. This can also be another source of amusement as you keep making references and laughing while the people around you think you’re crazy.
This offers a nice transition into the first downside to inside jokes, which is that they inspire exclusivity. One of the most common reactions to hearing someone make a reference to something you don’t understand is to ask for clarification and expansion on what that is, and depending on the context of the joke and who’s asking, there are three potential responses. The first scenario is the nice one, which is that the person asking is a friend and you’re willing to explain the joke to them so that they’re in on it. The second scenario starts to go downhill, with the person asking being a person in the room who you don’t know very well or don’t consider a friend asking and you basically telling them no. Finally, the third and worst scenario has the person being a friend but you telling them something along the lines of, “oh, you had to be there,” which might simply come from laziness, but on the other side might make that friend feel like the joke has something to do with them. Inside jokes are exclusive by nature, which can potentially cause problems in groups.
The second downside, which is more trivial, is that you can’t use them outside of the group of friends with which you made them. It has happened on countless occasions that I am about to say something that would have normally caused tons of laughter amongst my high school friends, but I stop myself because I realize that nobody in my new group of friends at college will understand what it means. Not only is this annoying because I want somebody to share the laughter with, but if I forget to stop myself I often receive stares of “what are you talking about” because the inside joke sounded entirely random and out of context. This does not stop inside jokes from being a great interaction between friends, it simply adds a level of annoyance to it.
