Fatherhumor

If you’re a guy that likes to tell a joke or crack wise every once in a while, fatherhood is going to be a disappointment to you. For the most part, the people you’re hanging out with – your wife and kids -- aren’t going to appreciate your sense of humor any more. You’d think that your wife would be able to continue to find you humerous, but her general sense of mild disdain toward you will cloak her and serve to strip the humor out of any and all remarks while the sound waves travel from you to her. So all your hard work, your careful joke-crafting, will go to waste. Fathers around the world have countered this with in one way: by adopting the generic “dad” sense of humor, to punish your family with bad jokes because they don’t appreciate your truly good ones. Hell, you aren’t just punishing your family for their not liking your jokes, you’re punishing them for not finding anything you have to say interesting.

Aside from punishment, fatherhumor is also nice because, if you spend a lot of time with your kids, there is only so much you have to say to them. Fatherhumor fills dead air.

Anyone remember the TV show Run's House, which aired on MTV for a while in the past few years. Run, one of the three geniuses behind Run D.M.C., the seminal rap group, was a hard, hard man and epitomized old school rap. Did his kids want to hear him talk about that stuff? Nope. If he wants to communicate with his kids instead of being a vacant father, he jokes around and acts hokey and silly. That’s what he does. And I figure if fatherhumor is good enough for the Rev, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us.

I’m told that in some cultures, each father gets a card in the mail when his first child turns two that instructs him on the sense of humor that he will thereafter be required to use. Like a rogue magician, however, Daddyfesto is here to reveal the secrets of black art of fatherhumor to the world.

The following are the permissible styles of humor – and they are the only permissible styles to use around your children. Master their use.

(1) Confused Deaf Dad. In this style, the father acts like a sit-com dad, announces a fact that is clearly wrong or mistaken and then acts on that bad information without deviation despite the children’s many attempts to correct him.

For example, on a weekend when in the car with the kids, driving to someplace fun (zoo, playground, Skyline Chili, etc.), you say “Where are we going again? To school?” No matter what the kids say, just mutter “we’re on our way to school” every few minutes. When they’re older, you can take this farther, pull into their school parking lot and tell them to get out. Or go and bang on the school door and act confused and say “must be a snow day.”

Pretending that hot sauce is ketchup is another favorite of mine that’s this style. The kids hand you the “ketchup,” you put it in your chili and then act like you’re Tom in a Tom and Jerry cartoon and just swallowed fire. You can put on children’s clothing and pretend that their coat is your own before leaving the house. You get the picture.

The other styles of fatherhumor are optional. Each dad picks and chooses his own. Confused Deaf Dad is mandatory. It is a father’s birthright handed down through the ages.

I am such a master at this form of fatherhumor that my four-year old has heard this schtick so many times that he no longer finds it funny and now, when we get into the car, he says “Dad, please don’t pretend you’re lost, OK?”

When your children, before you even speak, ask you to not use fatherhumor: that’s like being a blackbelt in fatherhumor.

(2) Jokey Threatening Dad. When you want your child to do something and they are ignoring you, but you don’t want to get actually mad yet, you use Jokey Threatening Dad to get their attention without having to get angry.

Example (shouted down the basement stairs): “I better stop hearing fighting going on down there or I’m gonna throw you all in the washing machine.”

Some dads take this too far. Once I hung out with a dad who said things like “you better get over here or after you go to sleep me and Santa and your grandma are going to put you in a giant blender that I keep hidden in the garage.”

Remember! It is Jokey Threatening Dad, not Child Abuse Dad.

(3) Obi Wan Kenobi Dad. This style involves no actual joke. You simply tell your child “You are going to start laughing in the next 10 seconds,” and then you start counting to ten.

Until they are 8 or so, it works every time...

(4) Belief-in-the-Mystical Dad. When seeking to criticize or correct a child’s behavior, you point out the wrongness of the result but attribute it to mystical or otherworldly forces.

For example, walking into the living room and saying “"Kids! Quick! Check this out! A group of squirrels broke into the house and ate a bag of chips and left crumbs all over the living room floor!" or, while in the car, in the middle of winter: “"I have to take this car into the shop. A ghost keeps making the back window go up and down."

Of course, my guess is that at least half of all imaginary friends can be traced to an overuse of Belief-in-the-Mystical style of fatherhumor, so be careful with this one.

(5) Reader Dad This is only useful when you have a kid learning to read. It involves you telling them what the word is without them knowing that you’re telling them.

For example, if reading a book, and the sentence in the book is "That would be too easy," when you get to the last word, you have to say "You can get this one. This word is easy.”

Or, where the sentence is “The branch is long” you say “Uh-oh, you’re going to have trouble with this word. It is really long.”

The best part of this style of fatherhumor is that your 4 or 5 or 6 year old kid will think it is sheer genius. I mean, you’ll never have such praise heaped upon you for such a stupid joke in your entire life.

(6) Corny Hokey Dad. This is a special advanced style of fatherhumor for use by dads with children 11 or older. Before getting into this one, a brief step back.

As noted above, the purpose of fatherhumor is not really to be funny but to punish your family and, for older kids, the punishment normally comes in the form of embarrassment that they have a father who tells jokes like this.

Eventually your kids will pick up on what you’re doing; they’ll realize that the whole humor thing is a schtick you use just to communicate with them. The child eventually realizes that when they are ready to drive your car and you say “bring the car back in one piece” that you are trying to reach out to them and say “be safe,” even though you have nothing at all of actual interest to say. The child will think that your efforts at humor have failed miserably, and they will roll their eyes at you, but deep down they appreciate the effort and will have empathetic and mildly warm feelings toward you. Mildly warm feelings are the maximum possible positive feeling a child aged 11 or older can have toward their father, so you take what you can get.

Corny Hokey Dad exploits this idea. While none of fatherhumor is supposed to be funny, Corny Hokey Dad lets the kid in on that little secret. Corny Hokey Dad tells the joke “How do you get Holy Water? You boil the hell out of it!” or “How do you catch a unique wild rabbit? Unique up on it! How do you catch a tame rabbit? Tame way, unique up on it.” If a child says “I’m eating some chips,” Corny Hokey Dad responds “I’m gonna eat your chips” which, really, completely doesn’t even make sense (and even sounds vaguely perverted), but that’s OK.

Corny Hokey Dad is looking for a gig writing jokes for popsicle stick companies. Think Mr. Walsh on 90210 or the dad on 7th Heaven. That’s what you’re aiming for. Jokes so bad that even your kids know that you can’t be serious for telling them.

(6-B) An offshoot of Corny, Hokey Dad is Puntastic Dad, who never lets a pun go past. If you pass a hooters, make sure you say “I hear that they are having financial problems and might go bust!” I could keep going, but my wife pays me to not do these, so I’ll stop right there.

And there you go. The 6 primary styles of fatherhumor. Use them wisely.

(Note: I’m talking about verbal humor here; not physical comedy, which is a whole ‘nother topic for another day).