The Big Brain Puns

Took a really big dab (weed) and was coughing my brains out, which caused the following conversation between me and my wife:

Wife: "Are you going to make it?"

Me: "Nope.. Cough Hack ..You're gonna... cough ..be a... Hack hack ..widow!"

Wife: "Nooo, you can't die!"

Me: Hack "And I don't even.. cough ..have.. hack ...life insurance!" cough hack cough

Wife: "Wife Insurance?? What is that - If I break can you swap me out for a new one?? Do you mean a pre-nup??"

My body couldn't figure out what the fuck to do. Cough, Laugh, it even got confused and farted. Fucking hilarious.

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

Because he might Pikachu!

I used to get to do these all the times. When the drawer got stuck I would wrestle the obstruction inside blocking it and exclaim that this would not be a problem if we just had a lesser cheese grater...I began to love bombing there for a while. Ah...

Edit- no one got the grater joke then either, don't feel bad. but it was on the spot so it didn't need all the setup i ruined here. Try this for your brains: Our drawers often had a lot of utensils and stuff in them, and some of it was also big, like the cheese grater. That would get jostled and end up on top of a fork pile or whatever and be up high enough in the drawer to keep the thing from opening, ie the drawer would open to where the grater hit the back of it and jam the works up, right? the grater was too great. i needed a lesser grater so the drawer wouldnt get jammed. Did that help?

OK... so did you ever notice how every time you spend 4 days alone in the woods and you make it out without a scratch or even a mosquito bite, and you're feeling all peaceful and relaxed and at one with the universe, you're not home 20 minutes and unloading the back of your truck when you slam your right shin into the trailer hitch... and amid the flashing white stars around you, your fists clench, your teeth grit, your body tenses and every "mean, nasty and ugly" word you ever read, heard, uttered or even imagined ("Wait... is #*&%#@!!! even a word??? Oh what the heck? It works!") goes tearing through your brain.... and eventually it passes and you keep working, surprised you're not even limping and it doesn't hurt more than it does... and almost an hour later, when you're finished and getting undressed to take your first hot shower in days, you see a lump on your shin the size of Rhode Island... and the first image that pops into your head is John Merrick yelling "I AM NOT AN ANIMAL!!!... in fact, it literally looks like a second knee on your right leg... so you spend the rest of the evening keeping it elevated and icing it on and off, alternating between a blue gel pack and a bag of frozen peas.... and when you go to bed, you keep the gel pack on while you read and then take it off before you go to sleep... and then you wake up around 3AM and decide to check your shin and the swelling has gone down quite a bit... but since you still have several hours before you get up, you decide to ice it again... but the gel pack on the floor is no longer cold so you get up, walk to the kitchen and open the fridge... and after taking a bite of leftover pizza from last night (because... well, you're here and what the heck?), you go into the freezer, grab the bag of frozen peas and take them back to bed with you... but they're all frozen into one big solid ball and well, that won't do... so you lay the bag on the bed to pound it once or twice to break them up, but instead the bag bursts open and suddenly there are frozen peas sprayed all over the bed and rolling onto the floor... and all those words from yesterday come rushing back into your head as you kneel to gather them all up... but suddenly your anger completely vanishes and you can't help laughing to yourself as you think, "gee, I can't remember the last time I pea'd the bed in the middle of the night"???

Dad and I walk into minor hockey league stadium. He sees the Chuck-A-Puck booth, stops me and say "if we move up to the big leagues they'll change the name to Charles-A-Puck".

My brain couldn't decide if I should laugh or just roll my eyes so I did neither and just stared blankly. It did not phase him.