Jokes and humour are the sort of thing that are always going to be subjective. Where one person might find something hilarious, another person might react with complete indifference. Where one person might find a comedian vulgar and disgusting, someone else might find them pants-drenchingly hilarious, (probably me. I'm quite juvenile).
The things that you find the most amusing are probably the ones that, for whatever reason, click with your personality. For example, lots of my friends love the film Napoleon Dynamite. I hate it. As far as I can tell, the main character seems to be mentally retarded, and we're supposed to laugh at all the mentally retarded things he does. That seems pretty harsh to me since, you know, he's retarded.
I would guess that I'm in the minority on the Napoleon Dynamite thing, which is fine. The fact that I don't find it funny shouldn't detract from how funny you find it. It's just that the humour clicks with your personality, but it doesn't click with mine. That seems to be one of the side effects of good comedy: it's only funny for a specific subset of the population, which includes you.
Most of the time I can see how other people might find something funny, even if I don't. To return to my Napoleon Dynamite example, I can see how people might find the absurdity of the situation funny, or the strange cast of weirdos that Napoleon calls a family. Not my particular cup of tea, but there you go.
You know what kind of humour I find no merit in? Safe humour. It makes me want to puke. Now, by safe humour I don't mean that I only like dirty jokes. Safe humour is a specific kind of humour that seems to be employed by morons trying to be funny and mothers of children under ten. It's the kind of humour where saying something in a joking tone is an acceptable substitute for actually saying something funny.
For example, yesterday I was in a shop that sold music boxes. You know the ones, you turn the little crank on the side and it plays a tune. It's like a broken mp3 player powered by your body. There was a woman standing with her friends by the music boxes. She was playing with them and cooing like they were the greatest invention since the anti-rape condom. Everything about this woman screamed "mother" from her practical haircut down to her sensible shoes. She went down the line of music boxes making pigeon noises until she reached one that played Happy Birthday.
"Hey," she said to her friends, in a voice that indicated a hilarious joke was coming. "This one's good. You could buy it and play it every time someone has a birthday."
Cue laughter.
I suddenly felt like I needed to go to the bathroom. The bathroom of RAGE that is! That wasn't even a joke! It was a statement! In fact, it was a statement that described the one and only function of a music box: its ability to play a single tune. She correctly identified that the tune Happy Birthday only has one appropriate context. That's like holding up a phone and saying "Whenever I want to call my friend all I need to do is input their phone number!" as a joke.
In that one moment I hated that lady so much I wanted to beat her to death with her own tongue. That's what safe humour does to me. Not so safe now is it!
Safe humour is what you get when you mix a lack of wit with an attempt to find something that will appeal to the widest possible audience without giving offence.
Other repeat offenders when it comes to safe humour:
Guys on dates.
When guys like a girl and take her out on a date they're followed by an almost tangible cloud of failure that looms just over their right shoulder. As a result they try to walk through the minefield of conversation without making any kind of joke that will cause their date to retreat to the bathroom and never return.
They end up making "jokes" like: "The carrots have been cut into little flowers. It's like a mini-garden on the table!"
University lecturers.
Lecturers have about 12 hours spread over six weeks to convey as much information as they possibly can to an audience that listens like a brick wall. That leaves them with very little time to make jokes. Some lecturers get around this by using their irrepressible wit to make even the dullest of topics interesting. Other lecturers try to pretend they have irrepressible wit by delivering dull statements as if they were jokes.
They end up making "jokes" like: "They thought they had the answer, but when other people went back and did variations on the experiment they found that... the results were not supported!"
Your workmates.
When you're hanging out at work there's always a chance that if you offend someone you're going to get fired. That leaves you with very few tools for making conversation interesting. Once you've observed that the weather is good and neither of you did anything over the weekend, all you're left with is humour that makes you want to claw your eyes out.
They end up making "jokes" like "Wow, the air conditioner is really cold today. Do they think we live on the sun?" (actually that one's pretty good.)
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