Category: Humor

So we have this cat who likes to hop into the laundry basket when you’re folding clothes, and then she proceeds to defend the unfolded laundry from the said predations of meticulous arrangement and storage.

So I said to my beautiful wife, “Meowon Laundry.”

To get the joke, you either have to know the ancient Greek language, the history of Sparta, and/or support the second amendment.

My poor wife did not know any of these, and since she’s furiously studying Spanish, she heard the Spanish word for key in there and didn’t get it.

But rest assured, Victor Davis Hanson would think it was funny. Unless he doesn’t like cats. Or doing laundry. Or it’s not funny.

There’s no food inflation.

But you know who’s to blame for the cost of a dozen eggs rising from $.79 a couple years ago to $1.79 now?

It’s the greedy chickens.

My son has started writing his own material, and he might be unclear on what constitutes humor. His jokes often run along the lines of:

Q: Why did the fork run away?
A: Because he didn’t want to get eaten!

He follows this punchline with his own brand of stage laughter, and I pause a moment to suss out if there is, in fact, any cleverness in it.

Then I laugh. Because there is none. Or none I can see.

But it does lend a sense of perspective to me as to what it must feel like to be a bystander to my sense of humor whose quips and punchlines often require knowledge of Roman Empire military unit organization. Or electronic surveillance techinques. Or the intersection of the German language and 1980s action films.

In short, my sense of humor requires my audience to be me.

So that’s how it feels.

However, my laughter at my son’s joke makes him try harder. And the occasional occurrence of someone getting the joke–that one person in the room who snorts at the punchline while everyone else looks on like a daddy wondering who would eat a fork–gives me the strength to go on making the obscure jokes.

Besides, they amuse me.

Tandana:

The tan on the face of a guy who wears a hat or cap and sunglasses in the sun, so the bottom part of the face tans but the eyes and forehead do not.

Overheard in the YMCA parking lot:

Beautiful wife: They’re doing burpees.
Somewhat homely husband: They’re snorting seeds? That’s gotta hurt.

The Internet makes it much easier to footnote my humor.

I think Tempest Hazard would be a great name for a band. It would have to play electronica, though.

(Source for the joke: the One Hand Clapping guy.)

To all my Canadian readers:

Happy Uno de Julio!

I don’t like the twee made-up word tween which apparently means a child between toddler and teenager.

Instead, I prefer the term middle-aged child. Because it further muddies the aging process that the introduction of “adolescence,” which means not a child and not grown up and without responsibility, apparently, that leads from puberty to age forty these days. By calling them middle-aged children, we’re just begging for hundreds of Internet articles about mid-childhood crises to gull young (and adolescent-at-thirty-four) parents to solve a problem that didn’t exist before the word invented for it.

Fortunately, though, most of the time I’m just talking to myself and Young Nick, the office kitten, so this phrase won’t catch on and a psychological crisis amongst our youth will be avoided. You’re welcome.

You can’t make an omertà without breaking a couple legs.

Thank you, I’m here all week. Try the veal.

Here’s the footnote for those of you who don’t get it right away.

Someone said on Twitter:

When six of us showed up on my side at the duel, the guy I smacked with a glove was surprised. He’d never heard of the five second rule.

I don’t care where you’re from (as long as you understand the nature and rules of duels), but that there’s funny.

How to mortify your beautiful wife into perpetuity in easy steps:

1. Comment for a year that you’re thinking about getting a new suit since you haven’t owned one in fifteen years, since you got that one for $5 at a flea market but ruined it by getting grease all over the back of the jacket while helping prepare the hall for the wedding reception of your then beautiful girlfriend’s friends.
    
2. Receive a gift card for a men’s clothier for your birthday.
    
3. Pick out a tasteful suit, and by “pick out,” I mean let the salesman do it for you. For an extra charge, they will actually put animal tags in them for you.
    
4. Match up the tigers on Sunday morning.
    
5. Tell everyone that you came to church in your birthday suit.

This will never, ever get old.

To me.

As I said on Facebook:

With the recent unpleasantness in Ukraine, is it time for Hollywood to reboot Red Dawn and make the bad guy the Russians?

In other news, I might as well just retitle the blog Recycler, hey?

I almost got a key to the city once, but the DEA got me at the county line.

Inspired by Trey. Who hated my novel, incidentally.

She blinded me with Scions.

You’ll have to make your own set-up for it, though, since I’m coming up with nothing.

I’m working on a joke about fencing and a good meal where the punchline is “Parry/repast.”

Please plan to laugh politely when I come up with the appropriate setup.

I was all going to post a tweet that said:

I just read one of my favorite author’s books. I am so glad I burglarized his house.

But I thought the better of it.

In the 21st century, that sort of joke might get your house searched.

Instead, I’ll post it here with the context of the joke so to lower the chances it will trigger law enforcement automatic social media scrapers to 40%.