(Miss)understood Puns

When I was about 5 years old, my dad told the greatest dad joke. He’d be driving the family through our neighborhood and would say “Look! A man wearing a dress!” My siblings and I would look around and laugh with my dad. We loved when he would say this (it was like an absurd scavenger hunt) but my mother absolutely hated it. “Where? What are you talking about Tom?!” She actually got angry since she couldn’t see the man wearing a dress either. Since he would do this on a semi-regular basis to make us laugh, it became a problem with my mom and she ended up getting so angry as to forbid him saying it ever again.

I never really understood what was going on since I was so young, but I really missed the man wearing a dress joke. At one point, I thought the joke referenced a nearby business with a kilted man for a mascot. A few years ago, I asked my dad what the joke was.

“Oh! It wasn’t the sign,” he told me. “We had a family in the neighborhood with the last name ‘Manwaring’. When we would drive by their house, I’d point at their mailbox and say ‘Look, a Manwaring address!’”

I was too young to read at the time so it took 20 years to be in on his brilliant pun.

Sitting in the living room talking about the appeal of nascar with the family when my step mother said she liked the drag races more. Without missing a beat I popped off with: I've never understood the appeal of watching grown men in high heels running down the street.

It was the best part of my day to watch everyone in the room pause, turn slowly toward me and groan loudly