Dumbing down Puns

Dumb calls 911 and yell "NOTHING FELL DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN!" The on call asks "Are you dumb?" "Yes, why do you ask?"

I Thoth I'd get more of a Ha, Heh, and a maybe even a Kek out of her, but instead she thinks I'm a Nut! I even got all dressed up in my best Khepri shorts to practice on my material with her. I had hoped she'd be more agreeable to them, but she even started bullying me, grabbed my arm and Hatmehit myself a few times, so I told her to stop with that and Imentet! I don't like being treated like some street Mut!

I tried to tell her, "Babi, please stop!" She, however, was having Nun of it! It was starting to Geb me a bruise! Besides, I hadn't even gotten to my Bastet ones yet! So I told myself Heqet all! I'm gonna tell my jokes, because at least they make me Hapi! She didn't care, just told me to Shu! Said I was a Nemty-headed fool. How rude!

Being a Tefnut to crack, I called for the Aten-tion of my friends so they could at least listen to my whole Set, and busted out with this great Amun-gus joke! I certainly thought it was a Neith little joke, but right off the Bat, they were telling me to Wadjet with the dumb puns, and I need to Wadj-wer I'm taking these jokes. One of them even did a literal face-palm and stood up to leave! I told him to stop that, because I don't like to see Menhit themselves, or anyone for that matter, so thankfully, Hesat down again.

I tried Anhur-ther time, but another friend accused me of Nepit-ism! I told him he clearly never Nu what that word meant to begin with, Aani just spits in my face! Ptah! I really Maat him angry, it seems. Nothing but Ra Ra rabble rabble with him....I wanted to wash his mouth out and see how the Sopdu in fixing that bad attitude of his...

After that treatment, I had no choice but to Pakhet in. Bennu really rough day dealing with all this pushback. Neper again will I tell another pun. Isis the error of my ways now and learned a valuable lesson today: Even the closest people in your life will either like the jokes you Hathor they won't. If they don't, you just have to Reshep your comedy routine to the crowd you're playing to, otherwise, you'll upset your girlfriend so badly, you'll end up sleeping in the Shed!

So, my table was ordering their drinks and the father of the table ordered by saying, "I'll have a coffee and a water. Black please." I responded, "we don't have black water here, sir." I am still ashamed.

I watched one of my colleagues one day as he lifted a few rather large and obviously heavy laser printers. He started with a couple of HP printers of some variety and then went for the one I had been waiting for him to lift. He picked up the Brother printer and struggled to lift it onto the printers he already had on his trolley.

Quick as a flash I said to him that he "shouldn't strain so much. The printer's quite light."

He finally got the printer down and looked at me as though I was dumb before making the fateful error in his reply; "It's 35kg. If you think it's so light you move it."

I could only dead-pan him with my reply of "He's not heavy. He's my brother."

I laughed as he tried to punch me. It was well worth it though.

Back in the before times, when sit-down restaurants existed, I used to order boneless cheese sticks and would just throw the word "boneless" in front of any appetizer with 100% corniness. The purpose of this isn't to make a good joke. It's not a good joke. The purpose is to make my dining companions catch some cringe splash damage and want to crawl into a hole and die out of embarrassment for my being horribly corny.

But there is a real, deeper purpose that I've discovered entirely by accident. People, especially young people, are so self-conscious and worried about saying or doing something embarrassing that it taints a lot of social gatherings. They go to a restaurant and are afraid to speak up even when their order is blatantly wrong. They'll tip well even when the food took an hour to arrive and the server has disappeared into the corn stalks behind a baseball field. It takes 2 hours of hanging out together before some friends finally stop nitpicking themselves, uncomfortable in their own bodies and brains, feeling perpetually judged, and begin to relax. These are the kinds of people who go to sleep every night replaying cringey moments from high school. Their last thought of the day is when the Burger King girl said, "Enjoy your meal!" and they said, "Thanks, you too."

It takes 2 hours and/or a lot of booze before they're comfortable enough to take conversational risks and truly reveal themselves. But if I come right out of the gate with a really dumb joke, then we can cut to the chase. There's less danger because someone in the group already shot themselves in the foot, right off the bat. They pulled a pin on the cringe grenade and then jumped on it.

You cringe at my dumb joke and then we're over the hump. Someone has already done something pretty stupid, so go ahead and order the hubcap of nachos and a massive chocolate shake because nobody is going to judge you poorly while they're all judging me.

In terms of price negotiations (haggling), there is a psychological concept called "anchoring". You throw out the first number and all subsequent numbers are compared to that number. This is the same idea. We've already set the humor standard pretty low at "boneless cheese sticks", so you can say the dumbest shit you want and, as long as it's not worse than my cheesy joke, it won't matter.

This is why, when you were a teenager and your dad took you and some friends out, your dad made corny jokes. He knew they were corny jokes. You and your friends un

So the two girls get invited to a dance. The country girl thinks this might be too high brow for her, and tells her cousin, “Golly, them city fellers might think I’m just a dumb hick.” Her cousin says, “Don’t worry. Just do as I do and you’ll be fine.” After hours of dancing they got tired, so they sat down. Another guy comes and asks the city girl to dance. She smiles sweetly and says “I’m contemplating matrimony and I think I’d like to sit.” So when the next guy comes up to ask the country girl to dance she smiles confidently and says, “I’m constipated on macaroni and I think I’d like to shit.”

So last night I was sitting doing my homework and listening to music. The song that was on was the sound of silence cover by disturbed. I was just writing something down when my dad came in and I asked me what I was listening to. So I said "I'm listening to the sound of silence". And then he says "wow you're dumb I can obviously hear something". I the groaned and moaned for about 5 minutes.

This morning, my 5 year old (Definitely not really named H) and I were discussing the hardships of having to attend (all-day) kindergarten nearly every day (on his third day). So, we applied some estimates and came up with the following:

Me: "So, there are about 200 days you go to school this year. And, since you're in kindergarten, you have at least 13 years of school. So you have about 2600 days of school left. At least."

H: "...Okay..."

Me: "But, do you have to do a week of school today? Or just one day?"

H: "Just one."

Me: "Right. And you can handle one day. You've already done that twice, and you liked them both."

H: "Yeah."

Me: "So, you can handle this, right? Just one day at a time."

H: "Yeah, I can do that."

Me: "So, do you want to hear a dumb joke?"

H: "Sure."

Me: "How do you eat an elephant?"

H: "What?! I dunno."

Me: "One bite at a time."

[H groans, flops down on the bed, and starts maybe-playfully kicking at me]

Me: "Hey, I told you it was a dumb joke."

H: "But I didn't think it would be that dumb."

Me: "You should know by now that if I say it's dumb, it's really dumb. Now, get dressed and I'll meet you downstairs."

[H invokes his future-teenager self and groans me out of the room]