So my sister Ann* and I were having lunch today and suddenly out of the blue, she leans over towards me and says “You know what, Kat**? I’m pregnant.”
And I looked at her in surprise and blurted out “When did this happen? How come you didn’t tell me before?”
My sister is currently about 8 3/4 months pregnant, and even if she hadn’t announced it about 7 months ago, it’s been very very obvious for some time.
I, of course, followed it up with a phone conversation with another sister, where I changed the subject in the middle of conversation to “You know what Ann told me at lunch today? She’s pregnant.” Her response was, word-for-word, nearly identical to mine.
Is this just some weird family thing here, or do other people do this kind of thing, too?
*Not her real name.
**Except she didn’t call me Kat; she used my real name.
I don’t quite get the bizarreness of this - that your sister told you she was pregnant when you’ve known for seven months and it’s pretty obvious anyway, or that you didn’t know your sister was 8 3/4 months pregnant?
Kat, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe her point is that she and her sister were sharing a joke and she wondered if anyone else does that with friends or family.
Like, of course, her sister’s pregnant! She’s about eleventy-seven months pregnant, but thought it would be funny to act as though she was revealing this for the first time, despite the fact that it is obvious to anyone who sees her.
Not just that, but to carry it on with another person who was previously uninvolved, and they not only get it, but play along, and then pass it on again…my sister that I passed it on to over the phone turned around afterwards and passed it on to my mother (whose response was apparently something along the lines of “Again?”) and I have since passed it on to my roommate, who also played the “When did this happen?” line.
Well you sound like my kind of family. Mine is often a little more… risque shall we say but still along the same lines. "Hey, Frank, I have some disconcerning news. Yesterday I became aware of the fact that you are, in fact, Chinese. As such, and I do not want you to take this the wrong way, you are uninvited from my birthday party. "
Is it time yet to start in on how intelligence and subtlety of humor are directly related? Not yet? Oh.
Kat, some folks do that all the time. It’s been my experience that people within the same family are likely to find the same things funny and have similar responses to the same joke. But hyperbolic shock is not new. It’s farly common when someone states the obvious to act shocked and say “No way!” and sometimes for the initator to come back with “Way!”
Let’s talk about my life. I live in a sitcom. I think I’ve detailed it elsewhere on this forum, and I know I talk about it on my blog. And with the life I live, my roommates and I always have wacky conversations.
Ours aren’t much towards the stating the obvious, except when one of our roommates continues to not pay attention to the discussion around him. We’ll be watching TV and be talking about the show. He’ll be watching tv and tapping away on his laptop when suddenly he blurts out something that happened or that was said ten minutes ago. Hilarity then ensues as we again try to understand how he is so lagged in conversations.
We also tend to have wildly speculative and hare-brained schemes come up. Like the night I went to bed early only to wake up to two of my roommates planning a magnetic floating table… As in a table top that is suspended over top of, what would have to be, several hundred pounds of magnet.
Or the plan for a Zeppelin brigade to fight the war on Terror.
Or the discussion we had about why giving everyone in the world nuclear weapons was bad… ie the description of North Korea receiving their nukes and before the delivery agents had left, the nuke is enroute to Seoul.
So yeah, we have some crazy crazy discussions.
I’m still bitter that a roommate convinced me Kenya was Swahili for “There’s an ostrich.”
All the time. And the bizarre, inane stuff just lives forever too. My mom and I have done this for years, and now we drag Mr. m into it as well. But I don’t feel too sorry for him–he knew what he was getting into when he married me.
I live in a student house, so yes, much bizarrity. The most recent has been thinking up interesting shows to go on a TV network if we owned one. So far, the top runners are; “Gorrillas on the Loose!”, where a gorrilla is transported in a box to a pedestrian/shopping area, and then set free; “What’s in the Cake?” an interactive quiz show in which viewers at home are invited to phone in with a guess as to which illegal drug has been secretly put in a child’s birthday cake from the reactions of the kids; and “Samuel L. Jackson performs Everyday Tasks”, a series which is pretty self-explanatory. The pilot episode, “Samuel L. Jackson goes Grocery Shopping” involves an out-of-date voucher. And hijinks ensue.
That reminds me of one of the TV cards in Chez Geek: The Animal Bothering Show. “This crocodile’s not fully enraged yet, so I’m gonna poke 'im in the eye with a stick!”
My darling Marcie and I often entertain each other by engaging in nonsensical conversations, usually by deliberatly misunderstanding newspaper headlines.
I work in a very urban school, and my students are sometimes uncertain about what ways of talking about race are appropriate. Every year, some student will mention my race, always very hesitantly and worried that they will be in trouble. I have a stock response for those occasions.
“Well, um, you know, Ms. Queen, you are white…”
Me (looking rather desparately at my own hands): White? I’m white! Why didn’t any of you tell me? Oh, no, when did this happen? Can it be fixed?
It’s invariably a big hit with the twelve-year-olds.
Sometimes I have those kinds of conversations with family and friends. Sometimes, though, I don’t feel like playing along, and I play the part of “she who thinks you’re all out of your minds.”
