I had this interaction once.

1. Friend 1 politely danced around “Yeah years ago I kinda thought you were bit of a jerk”
2. Me “Oh I don’t blame you I was kind of an ass & had some maturing to do”
3. The entire rest of the group, at once, “Oh yeah you were a major asshole” / “That’s why I didn’t talk to you for a while” / “Yeah no shit” / etc.

Anyways I started declining their invitations from then on.

Someone in my friend group once went “you are funny, and you are funny, and you are…” one by one to everyone else before coming to me, said “you are not,” and continued on to others. Anyway…

Yellow is a dick.

If you can make fun of yourself, awesome. Shows maturity. Piling onto someone else though is a dick move.

The best joke in response to self deprecating humor is self deprecating humor. If yellow was funny they would have made a joke about themselves then, not piled on.

I know it’s a meme, but for those who may not know, that’s the social cue.

Learned the same from scrubs. They can make fun of their kid, you can make fun of your kid, but you better not make fun of their kid.

Lol I actually learned a long time ago that self deprecating humor was the easiest way to manipulate difficult people into being friendly to get a job done.

I had a guy once tell me that when I answered my boss’ phone that I had wasted 37 sec of the guy’s time by not just letting it go to voicemail. From that point on I never answered the phone if it came from him unless it was directly to me, and when I needed to talk to him I would immediately say something like “well my dumbass screwed up, do you have a moment to help me out?”.

The best part? When that guy was in the process of retiring, it was me who he chose as his replacement (which I accepted and have been there for 4 years now). I still like the guy despite how much of an absolute dick head he was at times, but he never realized how much I had to manipulate him to make him amenable.

I’ve found that in some cases it’s the opposite. Sometimes, if somebody makes a joke like “I suck, hahaha”, you need to take it more extreme, like “who told you??? hahaha”. Depending on a bunch of factors, sometimes if you respond to an “I suck, hahaha” with “no you don’t, you shouldn’t think that”, they’re gonna start wondering why you couldn’t tell they were joking and start worrying that maybe they actually do suck.

Oh cool, its your work!