The Days of Being Dumb Puns

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

My best friend lives on the East Coast. I’m on the West. He often streams his games over Skype so I can hang out and watch. He was playing the Witcher 3, and fighting the water monster men. I said “They just want to know the shape of you,” and he coincidentally died at that moment.

He got really, really mad. I always knew my puns annoyed him a little, but when I was sad, he’d tell dumb puns he’d google to cheer me up. But he just went into a tangent on how much puns annoy him and how he doesn’t get that I keep doing them over and over again every day whenever I talk with him. Trying to stop or cut back on puns would be pretty difficult and make me sad; I love witty wordplay and commentary, and bottling it up feels awful. But apparently it really, really annoys him.

What should I do?

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]