When We Were Kings 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

I work at a zoo on weekends. We were feeding the King Vultures their meat diets today.

The female almost always gets her meat stolen by the male, so we have to keep the male away while she eats the meat off the exhibit floor.

The other keeper wondered aloud why the male would want her food when he has the same thing waiting on his perch. I said "He must prefer ground beef."

Thank you.

A few years ago, my dad and I were building an addition onto his house. He rented a tool from the hardware store and had to return it, so he asked me to come with him and we would get some breakfast. There was a Burger King nearby, so we decided to stop there to eat.

When we go to the drive-through, we realize the restaurant was closed down, so he drove around the building to get back on the highway. As we were passing the dumpsters, he stopped the car, backed it up, and pointed towards the ground near the dumpster. I looked for a few seconds, trying to see what he was pointing at.

Then... I saw it.

It was a giant, 12+ inch black dildo, standing upright next to the dumpster. It propped itself up on its fake dildo balls, gently swaying in the breeze.

I was astonished. I couldn't even imagine what events in the universe had to line-up so as to end up with that giant dildo meticulously placed next to the dumpster at a closed-down Burger King. I couldn't even begin to fathom why it was there.

My dad, with perfect timing, then shouted "GAY TIMES WILL BE HAD TONIGHT!" and sped out of the parking lot.

We ended up going to Denny's.