People think everything they do is twice as funny as it is.

This explains everything: People think their emails are twice as funny as they really are. Quote:

A trio of business scholars ran an interesting experiment: They took a bunch of people and had them write emails in various tones of voice, including "sarcastic" and "funny". Then they sent them to a handful of recipients. It turns out that the recipients were frequently unable to correctly read the tone that the writer intended: Only 56% were able to accurately figure out that an email was sarcastically phrased.

Things fared even worse with humor. The email writers were asked to compose a funny email, and to rate it on an ascending scale of 1 to 10 -- both in terms of how funny they thought it was, and how funny they predicted their readers would find it. On average, the writers rated their own hilarity level at 8.16, and predicted that readers would find them a laff-a-rific 7.27. In reality, the stone-faced recipients thought the emails were only 3.55 funny.

I mean, this is my whole life. I can't think of anything this doesn't apply to. (Or rather, "To which this does not apply?")(Who cares?)(Whom cares?)(Case-in-point?)

Like, I think this pretend phone conversation about a script for a movie about a "Rapebear"
is pretty funny, but now I'm not so sure.