Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

A joke that announces its lesson stops being funny and starts being a lecture. But the ones that stay with you for years are carrying something underneath, some true observation about how people behave. The teaching has to travel inside the laugh, not be stapled to the end of it. Anything that only entertains gets used up in one sitting.

The same holds for how you make a point. If you find yourself explaining the moral of your own story, you have probably already lost the room. Tell the thing well and trust the person listening to arrive at the rest.