There’s this guy I know who’s about 40 or 41 years old. He ALWAYS does this trick where he stands on a guy’s right-hand side, then discreetly reaches behind him and taps him on the left shoulder. The intent is to catch the other person by surprise, making him think that there’s someone on his left-hand side… and he does it repeatedly.
Now, I can understand someone doing this once or twice… but over, and over, and over again? I can imagine how a nine-year-old might think this is gut-bustingly funny, but a forty-year-old man? Good grief.
Maybe I’m off base here, but it seems to me that there are certain jokes that just cease to be funny once you’re past your teens. The whole “Pull my finger” or “Look, there’s a spot on your shirt” routine might be mildly amusing once or twice, and a callow teen might think that they’re endlessly entertaining. For the life of me though, I can’t understand how a grown man would continue to think of them as endless sources of entertainment.
I love that trick! At one point, all of my friends knew to watch out for me, so when it happened, it was just like my saying “hi.” Nowadays, I do it less, but it can be fun when I’m in a playful mood. That said, it gets annoying when it happens more than, oh, once every couple of weeks. And that’s too frequent if it’s the same person, or even the same social group.
I have a friend who just got himself a MySpace page. He’s 28.
His older sister, who’s maybe 35 or something and has 4 kids, leave 2-3 comments on his page a day that are poop or fart jokes. Sometimes they’re pictures or worse, animations.
Every time I look at his page, all I can think of is “How old ARE you?!”
That’s part of the problem. He only does it once every one or two months, but it’s always him doing it. And after he fools someone, he has this big grin on his face. He continues to do it, even though (on two occasions), I asked, “Good grief, man. How old are you?”
This is the same guy who tried to discreetly pull my chair out from under me when I tried to sit down once. Mind you, this was at a rather large gathering on a rather serious occasion – and I was in full view of the entire crowd. I pointed straight at him and said, “Don’t EVER do that again!”
Consider yourself lucky. I once worked with a creepy guy who thought it was great fun to come up behind a woman and grab her in a big bear hug. The first time he did it to me I told him he was never to do it again. “Oh, it’s fun. You have no sense of humorl” I told him I didn’t care and don’t do it to me.
The next time he did it to me I ran backwards and smashed him into a wall. He complained, but he never touched me again.
I think that’s just mean-spirited. The tapping on the shoulder thing is annoying, but at least you won’t get physically hurt by it. I agree it’s childish, but he probably just thinks it’s really clever.
Yeah, but it’s funnier’n’hell if the same person falls for it time and again. I knew someone who continually fell for the ‘something on your shirt’ one. Everyone would do it to him and he fell for it over and over; the more often he did, the harder we laughed. I think it took him a couple years to finally quit looking down - and he’s not a stupid man. In this case ‘fool me once - shame on you; fool me over and over again - I’m an endless source of entertainment’.
