A joke is meant to get a laugh and then disappear. That is exactly what the speaker of "joke" says has been done to them: they have been turned into something people use and then forget. The poem is a short, unpunctuated complaint about being reduced to a role. Others see the speaker only as a source of amusement, and so they stop seeing a person at all. Nothing is known to me about the writer, so it's safest to treat "i" as a voice the poem invents and to look at what that voice does.
The first line already shows the injury: "they take me as a joke." It doesn't say "they laugh at me" or "they mock me." The verb "take" is about interpretation, about how a person is read. The next line is stranger and sadder: "i'm not believed in." We believe in ghosts, in luck, in things we can't prove. To say a person is not believed in is to say their existence is in doubt. Then comes a list, "emotions / or feelings / or actual thoughts," and the word "actual" matters. It admits that the speaker may have thoughts, but nobody counts them as real ones.
The poem's most precise image is in the two long lines: "something to tell when breaking awkward silence / something to tell when trying to be funny." The speaker is no longer someone who tells jokes. They are the thing that gets told, an anecdote passed around. The repeated "something" turns them into an object, a tool people pick up when a conversation goes quiet. What hurts is how ordinary the use is. Nobody in these scenes seems cruel. They are just filling a gap, and that casualness is what makes the treatment so dehumanizing.
The word "joke" recurs four times in the body of the poem, and the title, set in guillemets like a quotation, repeats it again. Those marks make the word sound borrowed, as if the speaker were quoting what others say. The repetition works like a verdict read out more than once. "a joke" sits alone on its own line, followed by "plain and simple," a phrase that sounds like the speaker mimicking everyone else's certainty.
The structure is a staircase going down. The lines run through "i'm not taken seriously," "i'm not considered human," and then drop the "not" altogether: "i'm different / i'm a failure." The speaker moves from what they are denied to what they are called, from negation to labels. Then comes the turn: "but better yet." The tone is bitter and sarcastic. It sounds like a game show host announcing a prize, but the "favorite" label is the one that wounds. The speaker talks about "everyone labeling me" as if they were a jar on a shelf with a collection of stickers.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem moves like speech, in short lines of one to six words, with the longest lines placed at the point where the speaker describes being used. Almost no punctuation appears, so the thoughts run on without a full stop, as if the speaker had been holding this in for a long time. The lowercase "i" is probably deliberate, and one can read it as a small visual shrinking of the speaker. The only punctuation, the ellipsis after the last "joke," keeps the sentence from closing. Judging by that ending, the label has not stopped being applied, and the speaker has no final word.
The poem is significant because of a quiet irony. It argues that the speaker isn't taken seriously, yet the poem itself is a serious act, a way of saying "here are my thoughts, my feelings, and I am human." The reader becomes the audience the speaker never had, one that has to decide whether to treat this as one more joke. For a school audience the poem reaches something familiar: being the one whose role in a group is fixed by others, and discovering how hard it is to change that role once it has been given. It uses plain words and a repeated refrain to show how a label that sounds harmless can slowly erase a person.