Dumbing Down Puns

Dumb calls 911 and yell "NOTHING FELL DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN!" The on call asks "Are you dumb?" "Yes, why do you ask?"

So, my table was ordering their drinks and the father of the table ordered by saying, "I'll have a coffee and a water. Black please." I responded, "we don't have black water here, sir." I am still ashamed.

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

So the two girls get invited to a dance. The country girl thinks this might be too high brow for her, and tells her cousin, “Golly, them city fellers might think I’m just a dumb hick.” Her cousin says, “Don’t worry. Just do as I do and you’ll be fine.” After hours of dancing they got tired, so they sat down. Another guy comes and asks the city girl to dance. She smiles sweetly and says “I’m contemplating matrimony and I think I’d like to sit.” So when the next guy comes up to ask the country girl to dance she smiles confidently and says, “I’m constipated on macaroni and I think I’d like to shit.”

So last night I was sitting doing my homework and listening to music. The song that was on was the sound of silence cover by disturbed. I was just writing something down when my dad came in and I asked me what I was listening to. So I said "I'm listening to the sound of silence". And then he says "wow you're dumb I can obviously hear something". I the groaned and moaned for about 5 minutes.

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]