I’m a real social guy, I’m friends with 25 letters of the alphabet...

I don’t know Y

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👤︎ u/ElemesUK
📅︎ Feb 16 2020
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[Meta] The real purpose of dad jokes

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

... keep reading on reddit ➡

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👤︎ u/Permatato
📅︎ May 18 2020
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Making the best of senior prom

As I'm sure many of you can remember (or not), senior prom was one of the most exciting events of our pre-real world existence. However, in order to get to the actual event, there were three significant steps that needed to be taken care of:

  1. Sober up enough before actually getting to the venue
  2. Find a date who wasn't even weirder than you were
  3. Rent a tuxedo This last part posed quite a bit of a problem to me, mostly because tuxedos can be very expensive to come by. Luckily enough for me, a local formalwear shop had a great deal going on; they would give you massive discounts and even hefty prizes for referring as many of your friends as possible to their business. Eager as I was to save a few bucks, I proceeded to text everyone in my phone's contact list. Almost every one of them neglected to respond to my pitiful pleas of financial assistance, not wanting to get caught up in this scam that I myself had meandered into. Finally, my token black friend, Malik, unwillingly took my bait. He tentatively responded, asking more about what he could get out of the deal for himself. After much persistence on my part, he finally declined, trying his best to let me down gently. As my poor little heart finally broke completely in two, I decided to alleviate the social tension, replying to him, "Alright man, well, suit yourself."
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📅︎ May 06 2015
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