Describe a Funny Person You Know

The funniest person I know, without any competition, is my uncle Rafiq — my father's youngest brother. He's in his late forties now, works as an accountant of all things, and if you met him in his office you'd assume he was the most serious man alive. That contrast is half the joke, really.

I've obviously known him my whole life, but I only really appreciated how funny he was once I was old enough to catch what he was doing. His style is completely deadpan. He never laughs at his own jokes, never signals that a joke is even coming — he'll just drop some absurd remark into an ordinary conversation with a perfectly straight face, and it takes the room a second or two to catch up. By the time everyone's in stitches, he's already moved on to asking someone to pass the rice.

What I especially love is that his humour is never at anyone's expense. He doesn't mock people or rely on embarrassing anyone; most of his best material is about himself — his failed diets, his hopeless sense of direction, the time he confidently drove the whole family two hours in the wrong direction and then blamed the sun for being in a misleading position. He has this gift for telling a story against himself so vividly that you can picture every second of it.

He's also brilliant at reading the room, which I think is an underrated part of being funny. At family gatherings, if there's tension — and in a big family there's always some tension — he somehow senses it and defuses it with one perfectly timed comment. I've watched him turn the mood of an entire dinner around in about ten seconds. My grandmother used to say he could make a funeral laugh, which sounds terrible but was meant as the highest compliment.

The reason I find him so funny, I think, is that his humour comes from paying attention. He notices the tiny ridiculous details of everyday life that the rest of us walk straight past, and he stores them up. So when he speaks, it's not recycled jokes from the internet — it's our own lives reflected back at us, slightly exaggerated.

Honestly, he's shaped my own sense of humour more than any comedian on TV. Whenever I manage to make my friends laugh with some dry, understated comment, I'm aware I'm basically doing a cheap imitation of my uncle — and I'm completely fine with that.