# Funny debate topics, sorted by who is in the room

Source: https://decka.dev/ideas/funny-debate-topics

Funny debate topics for adults, work, class and family. 122 silly motions, a ten-minute format, and the two-vote rule that lets the absurd side win.

A funny debate topic is a serious argument about something that does not matter. Cereal is soup. A hot dog is a sandwich. This meeting should have been an email. Everyone in the room has an opinion, nobody has a stake, and one side has to defend the absurd with a straight face.

The motions below are sorted by who is in the room: colleagues, friends, a class, or the family at dinner. There are 122 of them, each one line long and worded so a room can vote For or Against. After the lists come a ten-minute format and the scoring rule that gives the ridiculous side a fair fight.

The rule is borrowed from Intelligence Squared US, which polled its audience before each debate and again after it. Lee Drutman went through the [119 debates](https://opentodebate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/how-to-win-at-intelligence-squared-us.pdf) the series had held by April 2016, and he states the scoring in one line. The winner is the side that gets the [biggest shift in its direction](https://opentodebate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/how-to-win-at-intelligence-squared-us.pdf). Nobody walks in believing cereal is soup, so judging the final vote hands the sensible side the win before anyone speaks. Judging the shift does not.

## What makes a debate topic funny

The laugh comes from the gap between the subject and the effort. A grown adult citing a dictionary to prove that cereal is soup is funny. A grown adult mocking a colleague's lunch is not. Four tests tell the two apart.

**Everyone has been there.** Armrests, group chats, the office fridge, the last slice of cake. A motion the whole room has lived through gives every person on the floor a story, and stories are what good speakers steal.

**The silly side has a real case.** Soup is food served in liquid, from a bowl, with a spoon. Cereal meets that definition, which is why "cereal is soup" lasts ten minutes and "the moon is made of cheese" lasts ten seconds.

**One claim, no "and".** "Pineapple belongs on pizza and ham does not" is two debates. Each side will quietly argue the half it can win.

**A statement, not a question.** Plenty of lists offer funny debate questions, and "Is cereal soup?" invites a chat. "Cereal is soup" gives the room something to vote For or Against, and the vote is what turns a chat into a debate.

Formal debates open every motion with "This house believes that". Keep it if the room enjoys the ceremony. It makes "a hot dog is a sandwich" sound like a matter of state, which is half the joke.

## Funny debate topics for work, all office-safe

Every motion here is about the work and never about anybody doing it. Run one as the first ten minutes of a team meeting, or three back to back as an offsite session.

- This meeting should have been an email.
- Reply-all should need a permit.
- A chat message that only says "hi" should be banned.
- Out-of-office replies should be allowed to be honest.
- "Per my last email" should count as a formal warning.
- The last person to join the call takes the notes.
- Whoever books the meeting brings the snacks.
- Slippers on a video call are professional.
- The office fridge should be emptied every Friday, no exceptions.
- The microwave queue needs a booking system.
- No slide deck should run past five slides.
- A thumbs-up emoji is a legally binding agreement.
- The thermostat should be set by a weekly vote.
- A meeting with no agenda should be allowed to cancel itself.
- Every team needs a mascot.
- The office plant deserves a vote at the all-hands.
- "Let's take this offline" should be retired.
- Spreadsheets are a form of art.
- Autocorrect has done more harm than good.
- Mondays should start at noon.
- Every birthday at work deserves a cake.
- Hot-desking is a competitive sport.
- Shared documents should lock at midnight.
- Whoever fixes the printer gets the afternoon off.
- Small talk about the weather is an essential skill.
- Voice notes have no place at work.
- Eating lunch at your desk is a crime against lunch.
- Jargon should go in a swear jar.
- The best ideas happen in the kitchen, not the meeting room.
- A "quick call" should never last longer than ten minutes.

Open a long meeting with the first one. The For side argues that the meeting everyone is sitting in should not exist. The Against side has to defend it in front of whoever booked it.

## Funny debate topics for adults, friends and parties

These are fun debate topics for a mixed room: clean enough for anyone, grown-up enough that nobody feels they are at a children's party. The first three are the internet's oldest silly debates, and they still split a room.

- A hot dog is a sandwich.
- Cereal is soup.
- Water is wet.
- Pineapple belongs on pizza.
- Cold pizza is better than hot pizza.
- Breakfast for dinner beats dinner for dinner.
- A tomato is a fruit, so ketchup is a smoothie.
- Socks with sandals are a style, not a crime.
- Arriving early is as rude as arriving late.
- Leaving a party without saying goodbye is good manners.
- Whoever picks the restaurant pays for dessert.
- Splitting the bill evenly is always fair.
- Every group chat needs a bedtime.
- Replying "k" to a long message is a declaration of war.
- Phoning without texting first is rude.
- The driver always chooses the music.
- The middle seat gets both armrests.
- Reclining your seat on a plane is fine.
- Spoilers are fair game after one week.
- Board games ruin more friendships than they build.
- Every party needs a theme.
- Karaoke should be compulsory at every party.
- Birthdays should stop counting at thirty.
- A houseplant is a pet.
- Every adult deserves a bouncy castle on their birthday.
- Napping should count as a sport.
- A ghost would make the perfect housemate.
- Whoever cooks should never do the dishes.
- Sharing a dessert is the real test of a friendship.
- Dogs are better judges of character than people.
- The least organised friend should plan the next trip.
- Dessert should come before the main course.

For a debate night, pick three that pull in different directions: one food fight, one manners question and one that is pure nonsense. The ghost housemate is the nonsense one, and it reliably produces the best rebuttal of the evening.

## Funny debate topics for students and teens

Silly debate topics make a good warm-up. A class that has spent ten minutes arguing about penguins knows how a rebuttal works before it meets a motion that matters. For those, the [classroom debate lesson](/classroom/politics-and-civics/debate-topics-for-students) carries thirty serious motions, sorted from middle school to university.

- Being able to fly beats being invisible.
- Dinosaurs should be brought back.
- Cats would make better teachers than dogs.
- Teachers should have to wear a uniform.
- Students should set the teachers' homework.
- Every school day should start with a nap.
- The class pet should mark the homework.
- Pizza counts as a vegetable.
- Travelling to the past beats travelling to the future.
- It would be better to be a dragon than a unicorn.
- Snow days should be planned in advance.
- Everyone should have a theme song that plays when they walk in.
- The floor is lava should be an official sport.
- Penguins are just ducks in suits.
- If animals could talk, cats would be the rudest.
- Sharks are misunderstood.
- Aliens would find Earth boring.
- Robots should do all the chores.
- Ketchup on pasta is acceptable.
- Every lesson should come with a soundtrack.
- A week without phones would feel like a holiday.
- Breakfast is overrated.
- Pencils are better than pens.
- Never needing sleep is the best superpower.
- Socks should be sold in threes, because one always goes missing.
- Spiders deserve more respect.
- A pet rock is the perfect pet.
- Pirates are cooler than ninjas.
- Superheroes should pay for what they break.
- Talking to plants makes them grow faster.

Use teams of three, and give every student a job: one opens, one rebuts and one closes. Nobody can hide behind the confident one, and the quiet student who closes often gets the biggest laugh.

## Funny debate topics for the family dinner table

These work for all ages and need nothing but a table. Save the first two for the end of October.

- Holiday decorations can go up before Halloween.
- Siblings should pool their trick-or-treat haul.
- The youngest should always pick the film.
- The pet is the real head of this family.
- Leftovers taste better the next day.
- Pyjamas are acceptable all day on Sundays.
- Fruit counts as dessert.
- Sprouts should be optional at holiday dinners.
- Pie beats cake.
- The last slice of cake belongs to whoever saw it first.
- Chores should be paid in dessert.
- The TV remote belongs to whoever is holding the snacks.
- Bedtimes should be abolished at weekends.
- Parents should have to do homework too.
- Grandparents are allowed to spoil the grandchildren.
- Hide-and-seek is better than tag.
- Socks that lose their partner should be allowed to remarry.
- Elbows on the table are fine.
- Sandwiches taste better cut into triangles.
- Breakfast in bed is more trouble than it is worth.
- The pet deserves a birthday party.
- Whoever finishes the cereal buys the next box.
- Every car trip needs a snack captain.
- Dinosaurs are cooler than dragons.
- Whoever loses a board game chooses the next one.
- Baths are better than showers.
- Every family needs a weekly pancake night.
- Grown-ups should have a bedtime too.
- Washing the dishes is better than drying them.
- The turkey is the most overrated part of the holiday dinner.

Put the youngest person at the table on the side they disagree with. Children argue the opposite of what they believe with total conviction, and the adults rarely recover.

## Which debate topics to leave out, even as a joke

Some motions get a big laugh while you plan them and a bad silence in the room. Leave out four kinds.

**Anything about someone present.** Their lunch, their accent, their car, their age. A motion about one person is a pile-on with a vote attached, and the vote makes it official.

**Anything about a group of people.** "Cats are better than dogs" is about pets. "Cat people are smarter than dog people" is about the room, and so is every stereotype dressed up as a motion.

**Politics, religion and real money.** Leave out the funny version too. At work, add pay, performance, promotions and redundancies, because somebody in the room is living the serious version of each.

**A motion with a target.** If it only works because everyone knows who it is about, it is a dig. Cut it, however good the line is.

The test is short. If you would need to check whether somebody minds, you already have your answer.

## How to run a funny debate in ten minutes

You need a chair, two sides and a floor. The chair reads the motion, keeps time and cuts people off mid-sentence without apology. Each side has one to three speakers. Everyone else is the floor: they vote twice and ask the questions.

Pick sides with a coin, not by belief. A speaker defending a view they do not hold has to invent the argument, and invention is where the jokes come from. It also stops the debate being about who already agreed with whom.

Then run it in this order. The first vote doubles as preparation time, because the speakers huddle while the room votes.

| Step | Time |
| --- | --- |
| Read the motion and toss the coin for sides | Under a minute |
| First vote: For, Undecided or Against | One minute |
| Opening speeches, For then Against | One minute a side |
| Rebuttals, For then Against | One minute a side |
| Questions from the floor, to either side | Two minutes |
| Closing speeches, For then Against | Thirty seconds a side |
| Second vote, on the same motion | One minute |
| The verdict | One minute |

One minute is plenty for an argument about cereal. In the Intelligence Squared debates that Zhang, Kumar, Ravi and Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil studied, each expert debater had [seven minutes](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03114) to open and [two](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03114) to close. A living room has neither the experts nor the patience, and a short clock is funnier anyway.

For a debate night, run three motions back to back with new speakers each time. Half an hour covers the evening, and everyone who wants a turn gets one.

Keep the clock honest. A speech is never funnier for running over, and a chair who lets the first one run teaches every later speaker to do the same.

## How to decide who won a funny debate

Vote twice and judge the change. That is the whole of the Intelligence Squared rule, and it matters more for a funny motion than for a serious one.

A silly motion starts lopsided. Ask a room whether cereal is soup and most of it says no before anybody speaks. Judge the final vote and the For side has lost at the door. Judge the change and it only has to win over a few people, which is a fair fight and a funnier one.

The change is usually small. Across those [119 debates](https://opentodebate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/how-to-win-at-intelligence-squared-us.pdf), Drutman found the winning side's shift averaged [10.3 percent](https://opentodebate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/how-to-win-at-intelligence-squared-us.pdf) of the decided vote. At a party of twenty, that is two people. Every vote counts, including the one from the person laughing hardest.

The underdog has some history on its side. In the same data, a side that started out unpopular was more likely to [wind up gaining support](https://opentodebate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/how-to-win-at-intelligence-squared-us.pdf), and a popular one more likely to lose it. Drutman found that strongest on science and technology motions and much weaker on politics. Nobody has run the numbers on cereal, so take it as encouragement rather than a forecast.

Count Undecided as ground. A vote that moves from Undecided to For is a gain for For, and one that moves from Against to Undecided is a loss for Against. To score it by eye, take each side's share of the second vote and subtract its share of the first. The bigger gain wins, equal gains are a draw, and if both sides lost ground the room has argued itself into Undecided.

Tell the speakers the rule and keep it from the floor until the second vote. A room that knows the change is judged can game it, voting Against first and For second to hand a friend the win. The classroom debate lesson keeps the rule back until the verdict for the same reason.

## How to argue a ridiculous motion and win

Never break character. The moment a speaker laughs at their own argument, the room learns it was a joke, and a joke is easy to vote against. The comedy is in the seriousness.

Define the words first: soup is a dish of food in liquid, eaten from a bowl with a spoon. The side that writes the definition decides what the argument is about. The other side spends its minute arguing with a dictionary.

Go after their best line. The same four researchers traced how ideas moved through [108 Intelligence Squared debates](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03114). The winners made more use of the back-and-forth, [actively pursuing their opponents' points](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03114) instead of promoting their own. In a funny debate the rebuttal is where that pays: take the other side's best joke and finish it for them.

The same paper counted the laughs. Winning teams drew [more laughter during the discussion](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03114), although both sides got similar reactions to their opening statements. That is a correlation, so it does not prove that jokes win votes. It does say the two travel together.

Concede something small, such as agreeing that dry cereal is not soup. A side that gives ground at the edges sounds reasonable about the middle. Reasonable is the last thing a room expects from the cereal side.

Finish on one line. The closing speech is thirty seconds long, which is room for one sentence the floor will repeat on the way home.

## Running a funny debate live, on everyone's phones

Two votes by show of hands means counting twice, and a show of hands is a vote where everybody watches everybody else. On phones the room votes at the same moment, nobody's choice is shown by name, and the screen does the counting. There are two ways to run it in Decka.

**For the full format, use the [classroom debate lesson](/classroom/politics-and-civics/debate-topics-for-students).** The room votes For, Undecided or Against before the first speech and after the last. Each side opens, rebuts and closes against its own timer on the big screen, with questions from the floor between. Then every vote walks from where it started to where it ended, and the screen stamps "For moved the room" or "Against moved the room".

It does the subtraction for you and shows counts, never names. Its speakers argue rather than vote, so they do not scan the code. The lesson opens on a serious motion, but the motion is one line of the lesson's wording, which you can change before you start. Each speech's timer is a setting too, so you can cut the clocks to the format above.

The activity's own screens never mention school, so it plays the same at a party. After the second vote it asks "What weighed most in your final vote?", and one of the answers on offer is "How it was said". After a debate about cereal, that is usually the honest one.

**For a lighter version, use the decks on this page.** Each runs one motion as two polls, with the order of speeches on a slide between them. The big screen shows each answer's count and percentage as the votes land, and the last slide tells the room how the night is judged. You compare the two votes yourself. To run another motion, change the question on both polls. The [live polls](/activities/live-polls) page covers what else a poll can do.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is a good funny debate topic?

One that everybody has an opinion on and nobody has a stake in, where the silly side has a real case. "Cereal is soup" works because soup is food in liquid, eaten from a bowl with a spoon. Word it as a statement so the room can vote For or Against, and keep it about things rather than people.

### What are some funny debate topics for adults?

A hot dog is a sandwich. Arriving early is as rude as arriving late. Leaving a party without saying goodbye is good manners. Whoever cooks should never do the dishes. Each one splits a mixed room, stays clean, and gives both sides something to say.

### What are good funny debate topics for work?

This meeting should have been an email. Reply-all should need a permit. Out-of-office replies should be allowed to be honest. Keep every motion about the work and never about anyone doing it, and leave pay, performance and promotions out entirely.

### How do you run a funny debate?

Read the motion, toss a coin for sides, and take a first vote while the speakers prepare. Then give each side a one-minute opening and a one-minute rebuttal, take two minutes of questions from the floor, and finish with a thirty-second close a side. Vote again on the same motion, and the side that gained more wins.

### How long should a funny debate take?

About ten minutes a motion. One-minute speeches keep the jokes tight, and a chair who cuts people off mid-sentence is part of the fun. For a debate night, run three motions back to back with new speakers each time.

### How do you decide who wins a funny debate?

Vote before the speeches and again after them, and judge the change rather than the final count. That is how Intelligence Squared US scored its debates: the winner was the side with the biggest shift in its direction. A silly motion starts lopsided, so judging the final vote would hand the sensible side the win before anyone spoke.

### What topics should a funny debate avoid?

Anything about a person in the room, any group of people, politics, religion and real money. At work, add pay, performance and promotions. If a motion only works because everyone knows who it is about, it is a dig, and a vote makes it worse.

### Are funny debates good for a classroom?

Yes, as a warm-up. A class that has argued about penguins for ten minutes knows how a rebuttal works before it meets a motion that matters. The classroom debate lesson runs the full format with two votes and timed speeches, and its motion is one line you can change before you start.

## Activities

- [Live Polls](https://decka.dev/activities/live-polls.md): Ask anything, watch votes land live

[Funny debate night](https://decka.dev/templates/funny-debate-night-eb29c8c8a9ca.md)

[Silly debates for work](https://decka.dev/templates/silly-debates-for-work-dd05093d5b6c.md)

[Funny debates for class](https://decka.dev/templates/funny-debates-for-class-778ae053bbba.md)