Terms Of Use Puns

It’s racist, they prefer to be called Republicans

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

I am a teacher. My students were watching the movie "Gravity." At the end, they were complaining about how bad it was (in terms of the Physics), so I said, "You're right. Gravity just doesn't hold the same weight that it used to."

My whole family is very, very white.

So my brother and I are at an NHL hockey game. I forget who was playing. My brother and I had gone to get some snacks are where trying to get my dads attention. We called his name, we waved, we screamed, we screeched, and nothing would get his attention. Finally we determined that we get his attention by calling the pet name he used for us when we were getting into mischief.

... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... COTTONPICKER!!!

At that moment 3 huge black guys turned around. I wondered for a second why they looked like they wanted to murder us. I had never actually parsed the word cottonpicker before; but in the second second I did. Took till the third second until I realized the rascist connotations of that term, and why 3 huge black guys might have some ill will towards us for screaming it so flippantly. I can only imagine how my 13 year old eyes looked as I processed this information. By the forth second I had grabbed my brother and we were running. We didn't stop for 10 minutes. We couldn't go back to our seats for the whole game since these guys were sitting right behind us.

After the game I let my father know how pissed at him I was.

TLDR: Dads don't have rascist pet names for your kids; you may get them killed.