What's the deal with Jest?

Jest is the name of a constructed language I'm developing. In-universe, it began as a language game spoken by American circus clowns, which involved substituting English words based on semantics, common idioms, and free association. This game evolved into a cant of sorts, before eventually being reworked into a functional language by the mid-20th century, when it was adopted by the wider clown community.

What is it like?

Much of Jest's vocabulary is derived from English in a similar way to the original language game. As a language developed for the clowning profession, it was purposefully made quite silly. False friends and inside jokes abound, as does polisili (silly polysemy). The language's grammatical features demonstrate the sense of humor of its users.

Jest is a relatively analytic language, lacking articles and cases, and favoring auxiliary verbs to complex verb morphology. Grammatical particles are used to structure sentences, so word order is not rigid, but the default order is SVO. It shows some degree of topic prominence, which could perhaps be analyzed as "funny prominence". Particles are also used to denote various kinds of humor.

There are two distinct registers in Jest, the informal Funny Register and the formal Serious Register. Almost all daily conversations between clowns use the Funny Register, and the Serious Register is reserved only for grave matters. The registers are distinguished by differences in vocabulary and pronunciation.

Jest in Action

(when I have a good example I'll put it here)