We all have friends. At least one friend. And we all crack jokes. Maybe not all the time, but still we do. Or at least we find ourselves at the receiving end of it, more often than not.

Based on some recent personal experiences, I think I’ve found a relationship between friendship and jokes. Yeah. Now, I know what they say, “There’s nothing new under the Sun.” So you might have already seen this somewhere or read or heard of it, or even thought about it yourself, but please bear with me.

So, this is the idea.

How someone reacts to your joke or playful insult mostly depends on whether they like you or not.

It might be flawed, but just think about it, if you already haven’t.

As friends we crack jokes, and make fun of each other. We even insult each other. But nobody is hurt or offended. One can even pull a “Yo Mama” joke and still get away with it. If a certain friend came to your mind while you read that, congratulations, you have a true friend.

But sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes the people we think are our friends, true friends, turn out to be otherwise. Those are the people who make a huge fuss over the simplest and most basic joke or friendly insult. I’m sure you do have such friends, or had and then lost.

Meanwhile on the flip side, if you don’t enjoy it when a certain friend, not everybody, but just one, makes fun of you or insults you the same way you do among yourselves, then there’s a good chance that deep down somewhere inside you, you don’t really like that friend that much.

Now let’s go a bit further. You can relate this to strangers as well.

Do you remember that pleasant stranger you saw at that party, cracking jokes and having a great time with others? Do you remember laughing out loud yourself?

And then, do you remember that other person that you didn’t like much, whose jokes were not even that funny? (But to which some other people were laughing and you couldn’t figure out why?)

It’s simple. You liked the first person due to a certain reason, and therefore you had no problem feeling comfortable around him/her. On the other hand, you didn’t really like the second person, for whatever reason, and involuntarily you start rejecting and criticizing him/her.

So, coming back to the point, if you’re not 100% sure who your real friends are, be careful when cracking jokes. Think again before making that friendly insult. Because the most harmless joke or insult you could think of, might end up in a broken friendship.

It’s always better to have real friends than just friends, but you know, sometimes the number of heads, does matter.