Individuals or groups (families, coworkers, etc) develop their own forms of humor that other people generally don’t use. By “humor form” I mean a standard joke format. Everyone knows the lightbulb joke, everyone knows how a knock-knock joke works, but people come up with their own forms of humor that other people don’t use.
Here is one that exists in my family: the intentionally vague conversation. It goes something like this:
Person A: “I’m tired of this.”
Person B: “This what?”
Person A: “This bullshit.”
Person B: “Oh, I’m really sick of that too.”
Person A: “Can you help me get rid of this bullshit?”
Person B: “Sure, as soon as I’m finished with this crap.”
The point is to have a seemingly normal conversation, except all specifics are replaced with vague words (often curses).
I’ll mention some more later. What I’d like to know is, what forms of humor have you or a group of friends developed that you return to again and again?
Mr. Athena and I do the Bitchy Wife/Whipped Husband thing and it always cracks us up. It’s even better when we can do it in public. Like going through the checkout at the grocery store:
Me: “Hey, get your ass over there and bag the groceries.”
Him: “Ok Ok, I’m sorry!” hustles over to the bagger place
Me: “What the hell is this? Cookies? You think we’re made of money?”
Him: “Sorry dear, you’re right dear, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Me: “God, you’re such a dumbass”
Checker starts giving us funny looks. We both dissolve in giggles.
I have a stock phrase I use when I’m tired, especially of work-related stuff: “If I could throw a curve ball, I wouldn’t have to put up with this shit.” It’s important to pronounce “throw” without the “r” to give it the full effect. I occasionally vary what it is I would need to be able to do to avoid “this shit.” The most esoteric I think I’ve ever said was “If I could spin straw into gold, I wouldn’t have to put up with this shit.”
Bad things happening to my team during a game are certain to elicit an “I hate this fucking game.” Good things elicit an “I love this fucking game.”
Whenever I can’t find something in my house, I use “Some s.o.b. break in here and stole my [pencil] [glove] [car keys] [can of soup I thought I had in the cabinet].”
I used to go to lunch with a good looking lady that worked on the 34th floor of a high rise. The elevator took a long time to get to the first floor. We had a running bit.
Her: I forget, is it my turn to pay for lunch and your turn to pay for the motel room?*
Me: No I payed for the motel last time, it’s my turn to pay for lunch.
Her: No I payed for the motel, remember, you brought the handcuffs.
Me: No that was the time before, you brought the whip last time
The look on the other 14 riders on the elevator = :eek:
Priceless
*FTR while there was lunch, there was no motel room. She is a good friend of my wife.
Dad used to use the same joke every time we were in the car.
He’d see something on the pavement and say “What’s that in the road, a head?”
But then my sibs would mock the false pause with things like “What will they think of? Next?”
Sometimes I’ll rate intoxication in relation to Chris Farley’s bumbling idiot character that he played in just about every movie he’s ever been in. If I’m drunk enough that I can’t get into the house quietly, I’ve “Chris Farley’d into the house.” This, of course, spins off into little silly jokes about me being drunk that reference stupid bits in these movies.
My husband and I have a couple of close friends with whom everything is ish following a pause. “I’ll be there Wednesday (pause) ish”, or, “grab me another beer, I’m only drunk-ish.” It started one evening while we were all highly intoxicated. To the point where we were putting arousal gel on each others nipples and blowing on it and licking it for better effect. I don’t know if it was our behavior that night, or if it was the “ish”, but every time someone says “ish”, i can’t help but start giggling.
My sisters and I always insult each other in fun, but it’s at about a kindergarten level, spoken as seriously as possible.
Me: “Hey, I really need to talk to you about something.”
Sister: “What?”
Me: “I think you have a… problem.”
Sister: “What’s that?”
Me: “You smell.”
Sister: “I know.”
Me: “I mean, really bad. Seriously.”
Sister: “I know. Like poo.”
Me: “Maybe you should think about doing something about it.”
Sister: “It’s because I poo in my pants.”
Me: “Well, honey, maybe you could poo someplace else?”
Sister: “I’ve tried. But I just can’t control myself.”
Me: “That’s a shame. Especially together with the ‘you being ugly’ thing.”
Sister: “Yeah, I’ve heard about that too.”
Me: “At least you don’t drool as much as [other sister within earshot].”
Sister: “That’s true.”
Me: “Well, I’m glad we could have this talk.”
I work for the post office, and over the better part of two decades, I’ve seen lots of changes. Certain procedures might no longer happen, or new ones created, or processes moved from our facility to another, or we get theirs. So we might lose parcels, and gain Express Post, for instance. So we have fake conversations about this…
“Do we still have ‘being a complete dick’?”
“No, that was absorbed into General Fuckwit-ness last year.”
“Why? That’s stupid!”
“Don’t I know it. It was a directive from Head Office in Melbourne.”
“Yeah, I bet it comes back quietly under a new, catchy name when they realise the mistake. Bloody consultants. What about the Office of Pompous Blowhards? Remember, it used to be on the second floor?”
“Aah. That’s still there, but it got rationalised and streamlined. It’s called TASK FORCE EGO now.”
My friends and I are all in our early 20s. We are extremely immature sometimes. We regularly call each other every ignorant name under the sun and make jokes about having sex with each other’s family members. We are quite disgusting. It’s very fun. We also make jokes about having sex with each other, even though all of us (the boys included) like men. Singing and dancing horribly on purpose is also something we do on a regular basis.
My friends and I do this too. Just the 4 of us, two women and two men. One married couple. There’s jokes about the other dude sleeping with dude’s wife, secret pre-marriage trysts, fucking eachother’s moms. Even funnier when one of us girls tells a “I fucked your mom” joke.
I have no idea why we do this. It is very very scary for other people (like when me or the other single person brings a date). We all have a good laugh when one of us has to turn to our date and say “I didn’t really fuck his mom, honey. It’s just a joke…”
Uh…we don’t do the singing or dancing thing, though
Deliberate misunderstandings are common currency in our family, for example:
1: Could you close the door? - there’s a draught coming in
2: I don’t think a giraffe would fit through that door
1: Just close it
2: Close a giraffe? How would you close a giraffe?
1: No, “it” is the door
2: The giraffe is a door? You’re not making sense.
1: You mean pence, surely.
2: What?
1: Yes, it is hot…
To my dad and I, the question “What did you do today?” or similar is answered like:
“Well, last night, I stayed up really late hacking this computer program. Next thing I know, I’m getting these messages to ‘follow the white rabbit’. There were some pills involved and I ended up downloading fighting techniques to my brain. Anyway, I eventually realized I was ‘the one’ and saved the earth from the machines. You?”
“Well I led a battle against the last remaining Germanic resistence. Soon, the emperor chose me to be his successor. Well wouldn’t you know it, they executed my family and I became a Gladiator. I ended up dying.”
The “skill” involved is being able to give an obsure movie plot that’s still recognizable to the other person.
Then with my girlfriend, I come up with ridiculously cute lines about how much I love her: “Baby, if you were a Kmart item, I’d buy you even if you weren’t the blue light special.” or “Honey, if [litany of horrible things] happened to you, I would be very sad.”
In our family, the answer to “what are you doing?” is always “mowing the lawn.” And if you know a family member is calling, you answer the phone by bellowing “Wongs!,” which is the name of the local Chinese restaurant from my childhood, where they always answered the phone that way.
Hubby and I are big fans of Calvin & Hobbes. A few classic Calvinisms have joined our private-joke repertoire. Calvin once asked his mother “Where do we keep all our chainsaws?” Whenever my husband or I ask each other where something is, the response is likely to be “It’s with the chainsaws.”
Another quote from C&H that we use a lot: when Calvin was pounding nails into the coffee table, his mom asked him “What are you doing?”, and he responded with “Is this a trick question?”
We have one like that; the answer to any question enquiring what’s for dinner, what’s for dessert, etc, will be answered “dirt and weeds” or “mud and worms”. One time I did actually give them mud and worms (it was chocolate mousse with jelly worms).
