Nobody Else But Me Puns

Nobody else was around for it today but I had a great dad joke. I was at Sheetz (way better than WaWa) at the ATM which is right beside the lottery touch screen machine. I was getting cash and the guy beside me was getting lottery tickets from the machine. I told him he should try this machine, it’s been paying out.

He's relaxing in a comfy chair, reading the newspaper, until he hears a quiet voice call out to him:

"Nice suit."

The man looks up and around for the source of the comment, but to no avail. There's no one else in the lounge except for an attendant, busily working away on the other side of the room.

Figuring he must've been hearing things, the man resumes reading the newspaper, until a few minutes later when the same voice says to him:

"That's a lovely watch."

Again, the bewildered man searches for the source of the voice, but there is absolutely no one who could have possibly said it to him. Exasperated, he gives up and goes back to reading his paper. But once more, the voice speaks to him:

"Great haircut."

The man whips his head up, gets to his feet and looks around but there is nobody there. Desperate, he calls for the attendant to come over. He asks:

"Excuse me, but could you hear that voice talking before? I can't see anyone else but me and you here."

"No, I'm afraid I haven't heard anything of the sort." replies the attendant, shaking his head.

"It keeps on saying how much it likes my clothes, my watch - even my haircut!" states the man, growing frustrated.

A beam of realisation dawns across the attendant's face. Gesturing towards a bowl of provided nuts resting on the table, the attendant chimes:

"Oh! That must be the peanuts! They're complimentary."

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