It’s natural to have your guard up around new people. Taking the whole thing less seriously helps. “A key part of improv is that you’re not taking anything personally,” Holland says.

Quite a lot of improv is, Holland notes, about trying to get hold of that feeling of unself-conscious playing that you had when you were a kid. The quickest way to get there is to practice being interested in other people and letting them shine, too.

“The best way of being funny is actually not for you to try and hold the sort of spotlight the entire time,” Holland says. “It’s to get very good at just noticing where the fun is and how to follow it.”

The holy trinity of party questions – “what do you do?”, “how was your journey?” and “what was your name again?” – will only get you so far. “You’re going to have a much better, more interesting, more fun conversation if you’re honest rather than pretending to know what somebody’s talking about,” Holland says.

One thing all comedians know is that they write material based on their “status”. Either they’re high status, and always know what to do, take charge of situations and come out on top, or they’re low status, and are the butt of the joke. Going low status is a quick way to get people on side, which is partly why loads of comedians lean that way.

“The key to any anecdote is that you are the punchline,” says Mr James Gill, MC at the Always Be Comedy club night in Kennington, London. He points to ABC regular Mr Joe Wilkinson, who’s both one of the biggest comics in the UK and a perpetual loser in his own material. “If your anecdotes are [saying], you are the schmuck with pie on his or her or their face at the end, I think you’re probably onto a winner there.”

Even the finest precision-tooled anecdotes won’t do you much good if you’re bulldozing people out of the conversation. And if you’re fretting about when to drop another one, you’ll be missing out.

“Your job isn’t to try to think of the next thing to say, it’s to really pay attention to the person you’re looking at and listening to,” Holland says. The more curious you are, the more avenues open up. “You become aware of building something fun together rather than you being solely responsible for telling them something really funny or being really funny on your own.”

Mallard finds that, when she’s doing crowd work, it’s good to remember that the bar isn’t actually that high. People tend to be pretty hyped if she can crack a joke drawn from what they’ve said: “It’s like you’ve done a magic trick in front of them, if you can talk to them about something they know from their life.”

Everyone, Mallard points out, has a few stories about funny stuff that happened to them, which they’ve knocked the edges off, buffed up and presented to friends. Stand-ups do it all the time. It’s like, she says, “when your partner starts telling a story, and you’re like, ‘Mm, didn’t quite happen like that, did it?’ But you know that they’ve tightened it up for comedic effect: they’ve added in some accents, they’ve punched it up.”

Gill recommends a little structuring. “It needs a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. “And if that end isn’t that you are a twat, you’re not telling it right. Try again.”

You still need to trust that what you’re about to say is worth hearing, though. That can feel like a leap, but just pretending that you’re as funny and interesting as you’d like to be can be half the battle. It’s a lot easier when you realise that pretty much everyone’s pretending, too. “If you think you’re really interesting and really funny, then people do tend to buy into it,” Mallard says.

Gill agrees. “So much of it is a confidence trick,” he says.

When she was starting out, Mallard found it helpful to imagine she was talking to someone who thought she was funny. “That can often be someone quite surprising,” she says. “To me, it’s my mum – she always finds me funny – or, when I was working retail, it was just one girl who, no matter what I would say, would crack up.”

Keeping a sense of perspective helps when you’re just trying something new out, too. “Something bad doesn’t suddenly happen when you say something silly,” Holland says.

As we’ve established, you can’t fake funny. You can, however, have little bits of it in your back pocket. It’s handy to have a reservoir of the kind of all-purpose quippy asides that Gill places as “absolute dad-level gags”, little rejoinders to tag onto what other people have said that can lever open a conversation. “Story of my life!” “Tell that to the judge!” “Sounds like my career!” Granted, they’re not big and they’re not clever. “But, by god, do they get results,” Gill says.

What elevates slightly groansome material is sharp deployment. “You will be forgiven for the hackiest of hacky quips if you can get the timing right,” Gill says.

A note on yesteryear’s quip of choice, “That’s what she said!”: leave it alone.

Most of the time when you’re chatting to your friends, though, you’ll be on your phone. That demands a slightly different approach to IRL chats. You’ve got less to react to than if you were talking to someone face to face, and yet so much more to react with: emojis, memes and the totally different register the internet does its funnies in. One hard and fast rule is that you’ll get more hits on the WhatsApp group chat by taking a back seat and chiming in occasionally.

“There’s always someone on the group chat who clearly doesn’t have enough to do at work, to the extent where you’ve probably muted the group chat,” Gill says. “And so, like a cobra, just strike when you need to. It’s so much more devastating.”

That’s true of posting on social media, too. If you find the pressure to caption your Insta posts with something cute, but hilarious and yet profound and also knowing and self-deprecating is overwhelming, you’re not alone. “I always kind of give up with caption,” Mallard says. She applies the principle of undercutting any earnestness with silliness. “I think the rule is, the more impressive the photo or the more life-altering the event, the less serious the caption has to be. I can imagine my wedding pictures would just have a poop emoji.”