The mechanics here are the same as any good opener — make him laugh, give him an easy way in — but the material can assume shared context, which is where the best of these live. The knowingly terrible ones do particularly well; camp thrives on commitment.
Apps reward the short sharp ones. In person, delivery and eye contact do more work than the words, same as it ever was.
The best lines here work because they assume shared experience — the apps, the scene, the culture — and that assumption is itself the icebreaker. Pride is the festival of exactly this humour; the apps reward brevity and self-awareness; the bar rewards delivery. The knowingly-awful ones are a genre of their own and consistently outperform sincere smoothness, because camp is a shared language and using it says you are fluent.
The lesbian collection runs the parallel repertoire, and the deliberately creepy lines supply material for friends who deserve to suffer.
