Kidding, Just Kidding: The Stories We Tell Sideways

There is a phrase I have come to distrust completely.
Just kidding.

I want to be clear that I have nothing against jokes. I like jokes. I have been known to make jokes, some of them are even funny. But that particular phrase, deployed at the right moment, does something far more specific than signal humour. It issues an instruction. Receive what I just said as a joke. And in most rooms, especially those with a power imbalance, the listener doesn’t have much choice but to comply. The compliance looks like agreement. But it’s survival.

The joke has two lives, and they are worth separating.

The first is the joke as trial balloon. You have something you want to say. Something that might land badly, or reveal too much, or ask more of the room than the listener is ready to give. So you wrap it in humour, send it out, and watch. If they laugh, you’ve been heard and protected at the same time. You can push a little further. If they go quiet, you retreat.

Just kidding. An escape hatch built into the structure before you even opened your mouth. A way to say something real while keeping one hand on the exit. This version is sometimes entirely harmless. A person testing whether their idea will be welcomed. A shy declaration wrapped in humour, because saying it plainly feels too exposed. The Just Kidding in these cases is more about self-protection than anything else. Most of us have done this. I certainly have.

The second version is different, and this is the one that stays with you.

Here the joke is a cover, constructed after the fact for something already said. Something inappropriate, or cutting, or designed to diminish. The just kidding doesn’t arrive because the speaker is uncertain. It arrives because the speaker wants what the statement did, without accountability for having done it. The statement lands. The damage is done. And then the just kidding seals it shut. You cannot object to a joke. You cannot explain why it hurt without becoming the person who couldn’t take one.

Something happened to me at work once. A senior person said something inappropriate. And then, before anyone could fully register what had been said, it arrived. Just kidding. A colleague and I discussed it afterward, both of us certain that what had been said crossed a line, both of us thinking it should go to HR. And then we sat with it, and the just kidding sat with us, and we understood exactly how it would go. He would call it a joke. We would be called prudish. The phrase hadn’t retracted the statement. It had made the statement impossible to hold.

That is what just kidding actually does in moments like that. It forecloses what can be done about it.

And here is the part worth sitting with. Everyone in that exchange knew exactly what had been said. The joke did not create ambiguity. What it created was shared pretence. A mutual agreement, unspoken and not quite voluntary, to receive something as fiction that both parties knew was not.

The experience of receiving a just kidding is also not the same for everyone in the room, which is something I find worth thinking about.

Consider the husband who makes a joke about his wife’s cooking at a dinner table full of friends. The joke lands with the group, some laugh, some smile, some find something interesting in their glass. The ones who didn’t laugh are not the target. They can choose their face. A polite neutrality. A half smile that commits to nothing. They disapprove quietly and move on, because the joke wasn’t aimed at them and inserting themselves would cost more than it’s worth.

Now consider the friend who is called a miser. In a group. In front of people who know both of you. The joke lands on you specifically and everyone is watching to see what you do with it. You have seconds. Do you laugh along, which feels like agreeing? Do you explain yourself, which sounds defensive and makes the joke land harder? Do you deflect with another joke, which requires a presence of mind that the ambush has temporarily removed? Do you say nothing, which the room will read as confirmation? Every option has a cost and you are calculating all of them simultaneously while your face is doing something you’re not entirely sure of, and the moment is stretching in a way that probably only feels long to you.

And if the group laughs, the calculus shifts further. You are outnumbered. The laughter has become part of the machinery. To object now is to object to the room. To name what happened is to make everyone who laughed complicit in something they thought was just a joke. So most people don’t. They find the laugh from somewhere, or they let it pass, and they carry the moment home where it sits longer than it should.

Just kidding has a cousin, by the way. I don’t mean to disrespect.

This one arrives before the statement rather than after. It announces what is coming and pre-emptively removes accountability for it. By the time the disrespect lands, the speaker has already placed themselves outside it. They meant no harm. They said so. Both phrases perform innocence while the content does something else entirely, and both are told specifically so the listener cannot easily say what just happened. Because what did happen? A joke. They said so themselves.

It is worth saying that sometimes a joke is genuinely just a joke, and the misread is its own kind of problem. Relationships require a shared understanding of where the lines are, and without that, even harmless exchanges become charged with things that were never there. Some just kiddings are honest. I believe that.

But anyone who has ever written a joke will tell you there is always something true underneath it. The joke is where the real observation went when saying it plainly felt like too much. The laugh, when it comes, is recognition. The comedian didn’t create the feeling in the room. They just found its shape. And the audience laughed because they were already carrying it.

Which means the just kidding, even when it is genuinely meant, is rarely about nothing.

Just kidding. Except nobody ever is.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.