So many Dopers come from some seriously dysfunctional* families. Some of you have family with a sense of humor. Surely, there’s some overlap. Right? So, what’s the most sitcom-worthy line your crazy relatives have laid on you?
Mine: My mother told me that I’m not qualified to be a stripper.
Note - I was not some uggo or anything. At the time (college senior) I was a 34 B and still skating happily on the metabolism that comes with taking dance lessons 3 or 4 times a week. That’s right, I was hawt! But apparently, I was not qualified to be a stripper. That line immediately became a hit among my friends, and to this day, Mr. Horseshoe sometimes uses it to diffuse tension:
Him: Dammit, you {A}!
Me: Yeah, well, you {B} and {C}!
Him: So what? You {D} all the damn time!!
Me: Fuck you, asshole! You {E}!
Him: Yeah, well … you’re not qualified to be a stripper!
Argument avoided - the whole thing dissolves into giggles.
So … any funny lines you’d like to share?
(* Like, really messed-up stuff in some cases, but if it’s possible, I’d like to keep this to the lighter side, please.)
When my mom starts a story out with, “So, I was minding my own business,” you know something insane is about to come out of her mouth. The last time she started a story out that way, she had inadvertently broken & entered someone’s house. Make that two someone’s houses.
She was on her way to a party in the country and the host had given really poor directions. So my mom pulled up to a house with the door open and rang the bell. When no one answered, she walked in and had a seat. She waited for about 15 minutes and some kid finally walked in and asked who she was. Then she got to the next house (keep in mind it’s the country and many of the houses were about 1/4 mile apart) and walked in on some kid watching TV in the front room. He offered her a drink, but she said no and went to the next house, which finally turned out to be the party house.
Before that happened, when she started, “So, I was minding my own business,” a SWAT team had made its way through her back yard and busted the people in the very nice suburban house behind her for the meth lab they’d made in the back of the home daycare they ran.
When my daughter was a baby, my then-mother-in-law was over visiting me one day. I was playing with the baby, holding her up in the air and jouncing her around. After one particularly high jounce, Ruby jumped up from the couch and shouted “Dont!! You’ll turn her liver over and kill her !!”
My Daddy used to tell us silly things when we were kids. Of the large red jewel in his class ring he said “That’s the eye of a REAL tiger. I strangled it with my BARE HANDS in the jungles of the Amazon”. For the longest time, I believed that !
Important background: 1. my grandma knows a lot about art. 2. Years ago I was involved with an ad campaign that involved the photography of William Wegman, y’know, the guy who photographs his Weimeraners. I have a fine quality print of one of the ad posters on my wall.
–Scene: Grandma walks into my apartment for the first time—
(sees poster)
G: William Wegman, eh?
Me: Yeah see, my team developed this campaign…
G: (cutting me off) He’s nothing but a DOG PIMP
Me: err…
–fin–
My mom said I’m so good looking I should be a model. She’s apparently the only person in the entire world who doesn’t agree that I have a face for radio.
My father has always been quite the player similar to Bill Clinton except with much better taste. He has been married three times and rather recently came into a true fortune. If I keep him on the phone long enough, he will tell me exactly what he is thinking. It isn’t hard to guess. He has been been toying around with the idea of buying a 20 year old supermodel (effectively speaking) as a wife. As the oldest son, I felt a need to put a stop to that. I spent a good hour last night convincing him that he would be much better off just flying to Las Vegas every few weeks and buying every super exclusive prostitute in the area as needed. It was a dead serious conversation and I was running the numbers the whole time and explaining the legal implications of getting hitched in a chapel somewhere and what that could do to his kids and grandkids. He promised to run all these ideas by me for approval from now on.
When I was growing up, the elderly couple next door were grandparents-by-proxy (mine lived far away).
One time, Grandma Mabel and I (as an adult) were talking about a stuck-up neighborhood girl I used to play with when I was little. Grandma said, “Oh yeah, that [Susie Smith], she thinks her shit’s good to eat.”
I still use that phrase to describe people who think they’re better than everyone else.
She also once told of being out on the town with Grandpa, and he pissed her off for some reason, so she walked home by herself, in the middle of the night, in her high heels, hugely pregnant.
She was pretty rough around the edges, but she had her soft moments too. In her 70s, she used to get quite misty talking about her mother, who died when Grandma was very young. She said she still missed her.
A young man moved into the house next to us. No big deal, no problems. First indication to us that there WAS a problem: Kids come in from the back yard one night and say: “the neighbors dog is crying a lot-I think it is hurt”. We go outside and sure enough the dog is running around in it’s backyard and periodically stopping and crying out, then running around again. Then we hear a small sound near our fence and shine the flashlight on a newborn puppy! We realized that she was running around and then stopping to push out a puppy and then continue running around. There were 5 puppies scattered around their back yard. We told the neighbor and he gathered them up and took them into his house.
Shortly afterward, one Saturday afternoon, one son comes into the house and says “Daddy, Daddy, the army is coming down the street!” Yeah, right, he thinks. Then the other son comes running in “Daddy, Daddy, the army is coming down the street!” Wha??? Then daddy sees a man dressed in fatigues carrying a machine gun run across our front yard!! :eek: They went to that house next door and arrested the drug user/dealer that was living there. One of the agents said the house was absolutely filthy inside, trash and dog poop everywhere. I think the dog had been getting some of the drugs.
My grand-dad was for some time a semipro boxer, and a good one: he had a good record in Pennsylvania Golden Gloves tournaments, and acquired the cool nickname of “The Woodland Flash.” Unfortunately, in his later years, repeated shots to the head left him unable to remember much. But occasionally flashes of confused remembrance came to him.
For some reason my parents and Granddad and I were driving to State College past Rockview State Penitentiary. This triggered a vivid memory for Granddad, and for half an hour he regaled us with stories of sparring against prison inmates. His Parkinson’s Disease, which usually left him a sad shell of himself, this time completely erased his inhibitions, and he let loose with stream-of-consciousness obscenity: “They let us fight every fucker in there…my head hurt for days. The fuckers I really hated fighting were the n****ers, they were tough bastards.”
I had never once heard him drop an N-bomb before. My parents were embarrassed as hell, but that was about the most authentic story I’d ever heard from Granddad. Race relations were not great in Central PA during his day and he inadvertently demonstrated that.
When my daughters were young, I told them that if they went outside with wet hair, they would turn into pickleheads. I also told them that they once had an older sister, but she went outside with wet hair, of course turned into a picklehead, and we were forced to eat her.
Walking up the street with 3yo Nephew, whom I had picked up from Kindergarten.
“I hate it that I can’t wear skirts. When I grow up, I’m going to be a girl!” looks at me sideways to see how much am I freaking out “That way I’ll be able to wear trousers and I’ll be able to wear skirts.”
“I see. And will you change your name as well? Many boys who become girls get a new name.”
“Yes. I’ll be Paula.” Then, remembering that’s his sister’s name (he picked it himself): “No, not Paula! Uhm… Jaula!”
“Cage? You’ll be a girl called Cage? Wow, that’s an unusual name for a girl!” Nephew dissolves into giggles
Related:
“But I want to wear a skirt!”
His Mom: “You can’t wear a skirt! Boys don’t wear skirts!”
(Sotto voce, while the Kid had run several yards ahead) “Don’t let him go to Scotlaaaand”
“ Oh my… you mean… they do wear the kilts?”
“Yup. On normal days, and even more if there is any kind of sports event or some sort of holiday.”
“D’oh!”
What I liked about this second one is that she started checking her facts before stating something like “boys don’t have long hair” and also including caveats along the lines of “if you still want to do that when you’re on your own, you will be able to - but not while you live in my house.” The Kid understands “my house, my rules.”
My grandmother was a pistol. Everyone within a hundred yards knew her opinion about everything and she kept a baseball bat with her all the time 'to knock any cat in the nuts if they bother me."
But she had an odd habit. She liked to talk about her and my (then deceased) grandfather’s sex lives. She never had Alzheimer’s - instead she died from the 3 packs of unfiltered cigarettes she smoked every day of her life from age 16. But she like to burst out at random intervals, “You think I didn’t like having sex with Stan? How do you think your parents were born? I liked it plenty good!”
My grandfather, who recently passed away, was an Iwo Jima veteran. He never talked about the war with us generally but we would occasionally ask him questions about his time in the military and stuff like that. He never described battles to us but the gentle old man did say once, “You know, I never could get used to killing people.”
My mother is very prim and proper at all times except for one party at the house where she had far too much to drink on a hot day. We were talking about travel and she commented:
“You know, I don’t like traveling to Mexico City - it gives me a headache”
We asked: “Because of the altitude?”
“No, because of the Mexicans”
Not all that funny, I know, but my Mother would be appalled if her sober self could remember her drunk self had said that.
My grandparents used to have a beach house growing up which had a random storage room on one side that was mostly filled with broken furniture. At one point when I was 10 and walking by it with my uncle, he suddenly blurted out that he lost his virginity in that room, then got totally embarrassed and said “don’t tell your grandparents”.
My grandmother was a grade-A crazy person (she almost certainly had BPD and was abusive), and my mom has a lot of bizarre and disturbing stories about her. My favorite for the sheer lunacy is this one: one day, my grandmother, my mom and a couple of her siblings were in the kitchen. Mom and siblings were talking and joking amongst themselves, and Grandma got it into her head that they were making fun of her. She went off of on them, shrieking profanity, and as my grandmother had a knack for stringing together curses into some really inventive phrases, she said something that made one of the kids laugh. Grandma got so mad at that that she squatted down and peed on the floor.
…
I mean, I don’t know WTF. I’ve been righteously pissed off before, but never once has it occurred to me to express my anger through urination.
Our family priest was truly a member of the family. He married my parents and was my GodFather. He and my Grandfather were on the beach together at Normandy. Father Jim was about 6’4" and one of the scariest looking guys you could ever hope to meet. Massachusetts Irish warrior type. He taught me to bet at poker.
One day I’m about 24 I guess, visiting my Dad (they were long since divorced) and he’s just moved to Michigan. He’s drunk and starts to complain that he hasn’t found a girlfriend yet. I tell him he doesn’t need to date to be happy. He says he’s a man, and it’s different. I say “Well, Father Jim seems to survive all right.” Dad laughs a laugh that is pure New Hampshire satire and says:
“I wish to Christ I was getting as much as Father Jim!”
Father Jim “Retired” the following year. From the priesthood. At 55. I always thought it was odd that a Catholic priest could afford a live-in housekeeper. . .
But apparently, I was not qualified to be a stripper. That line immediately became a hit among my friends, and to this day, Mr. Horseshoe sometimes uses it to diffuse tension:
Oh my… you mean… they do wear the kilts?”