The Price Is Right Puns

Hair Club Salesperson: “Well sir, how much do you want toupee?”

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

Context:

• I currently live and study in the Philippines

• One Philippine Peso (₱) is approximately 1/40 a dollar. Go check the conversion ratio if you doubt.

• A single stick of this choco wafer stick right here (called Stick-O) usually costs at about ₱1

• I study in a college where student organizations are prevalent and their means of collecting funds is by Fund Raising Activity, i.e., selling consumables to students (usually food at exorbitant retail prices)

Every single time when I see an organization member doing his/her FRA selling Stick-O's, I ask...

Me: How much is that?

FRA: Three for five.

Me: ₱3 for 5 pieces?

They chuckle in shame. They then correct me:

FRA: No, 3 pieces for ₱5 pesos

I work with a guy who's a couple years older than my dad and has kids around my age. He pointed out that the price on our website was wrong, I fixed it and had him take another look at it.

"Would you say..." pauses for slight chuckle "Would you say The Price is Right?"