Last Splash Puns

Before you let your kids get a puppy, take the Puppy Test.

Best taken in the autumn or mid winter.

1. Buy a lead and tie it to a big stone, walk around dragging the stone behind you.
2. Get up at 5am, go out in the pouring rain and walk up and down a muddy path, repeating good girl/boy, wee wees...poo poos, quickly please
3. Stuff your pockets with plastic bags and pick up all the poo you can find, obviously not your dogs as you have not bought it yet ??
4. Start wearing your shoes indoors, especially during muddy times
5. Collect leaves off the ground and spread them on the floor
6. Carry sticks and branches indoors and chop them up on your carpet
7. Pour cold apple juice on the rug and floor....walk barefooted over it in the dark
8. Drop some chocolate pudding on your carpet in the morning and then try to clean it in the evening
9. Wear socks to which you have made holes using a blender
10. Jump out of your favorite chair just before the movie ends and run to open the back door
11. Cover all your best clothes with dog hair, dark clothes with blond hairs and light clothes with dark hairs
12. Tip all just ironed clothes on the floor
13. Make little pin holes in all your furniture, especially chair and table legs
14. When doing dishes, splash water all over the place and don't wipe it.
15. Spread toilet paper all over the house when you leave the house and tidy up when you get back home
16. Forget any impulse holidays and/or breaks
17. Always go straight home after work or school
18. Go for walks no matter what the weather, and inspect every dirty paper, chewing gum and dead fly you might find
19. Stand at your back door at five in the morning shouting, "Bring Mr Bumble and Mr Lion in, its raining.”
20. Wake up at 3am. Place a correct size bag of flour on top of yourself and try to sleep, whilst wiping your face with a dishcloth, which you have left next to your bed in a bowl last week.
    Repeat everyday over 6 months and if you still think getting a puppy sounds like a good idea, Congratulations, you might be ready for your kids to get your puppy.

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