My wife brought the book home the other day and she was roaring over it. She told me I had to read it because it was so funny and I have a quirky sense of humor.
And now there is a TV show starring William Shatner as the dad. :dubious:
Now, I know there are vulgar people (I’m one of them), and I know there are highly abrasive people (me too) but if his dad said all of these things to him then I’m Orville Reddenbacher (sp?).
I do think that the quotes are really good zingers but, I’m sorry, I don’t think they were actually spoken by his dad to him. They are too plentiful and expertly crafted to have been thrown about willy-nilly to his son. They read as though someone spent ALOT of time making them JUST right.
I believe his dad was probably a fiery bastard and that he inspired alot of the ideas and maybe even said a few of them verbatim but I think there was ALOT of embellishment and probably downright faking of this quotes.
Of course I don’t have any proof and it’s just my gut telling me this.
What do you think? Are they all real? Did his dad REALLY say these things off the cuff in the perfect situations?
EDIT: I was going to edit this line “I don’t think they were actually spoken by his dad to him” because it’s the worst gathering of English words ever typed on a screen but left it instead to teach myself a lesson.
Jaded and cynical Internetizen that I am, I wanna say FAKE!
Problem is, I really do know certain people who are hilarious all the time who who drop comedic gold nuggets every time they open their mouths, so I just can’t be certain.
I’m not bowled over by the brilliance of each and every line there, which I guess makes it seem plausible enough.
For example,
would be funnier if it was flipped to be saying that the girlfriend wasn’t pretty, she just looked that way standing next to him, which is harsher on both of them. As written, it’s pretty mild.
It meets my level of cynicism. If you look at his tweets, he doesn’t actually post all that often. So it’s not like his Dad is cranking out 17 zingers a day. The book is probably a compilation of years worth of quotes. I’m sure he edited out the “ums”. And while they are funny, even hysterical sometimes, they aren’t strictly jokes with punchlines, so there’s not a lot of forethought needed.
In high school our Latin teacher had a tendency to inadvertently say funny/cool things so much so that we started keeping a list. Yogi Berra was also known for being humorously quotable. Some people just have a funny way of saying things without doing so intentionally.
I’d be more apt to think, like you, that his dad said some crazy shit over the years and when he decided to write some of it down he ended up with a handful or two of funny quotes. Enough to be inspired to do something with but not enough to make a book or TV show about. I’d say the bulk of the stuff was probably made up by the author as filler.
Not that different from those self help or management books that take a good idea that could probably be fit into a pamphlet and strrrrrretch it into a book.
(Can’t really make ca-ching off selling pamphlets now can you?)
I always assumed he edited them pretty heavily. Most of the funny things I would say would be much funnier if I got to think about them and reword them perfectly before everyone heard them.
I haven’t seen the show, but the Twitter feed? I’ve mentioned my own mother before, but she is a grade-A nutjob - and she has definitely said about 50% of the stuff she’s said is on par with the Twitter feed. She’s also a physician like the father in question. It’s a combination of not giving a shit about what others think (and not having to), making a ton of money, and completely lacking self awareness.
She once told my younger brother that if he were the first kid, he would have been their only one. Or how she hates homosexuals (yet one of her close friends from college is gay and she’s totally fine with it).
A few weeks ago she started laughing uproariously at my uncle at his fear of flying; the man hasn’t flown in 35 years and she’s laughing her fool head off “Hahahahahaha my god, in a twin prop? You’ll be glued to the seats hahahaha my god you’ll just about shit yourself, wontcha?”.
They’re not bad people, just painfully lacking self-awareness.
I don’t see the slightest reason to question their authenticity. They have a consistency of tone and outlook. Some people just are naturally funny. The guy that started it originally just intended to share the quotes with his friends and had no idea the twitters would become as popular as they did.
You seriously think the author himself crafts all the jokes and is just lying about his dad saying them? I find that kind of hard to believe, but even if it was true, it deosn’t make the quotes any less funny. If he’s making them up, he’s a genius.
By the way here is an interview with Justin Halpern confirming that the quotes go way back.
*So, the big question is, does your dad really say that stuff?
He does, yeah. He’s always been the type of guy who says whatever, whenever, so even when I was little, I would write down stuff he said in a journal, but when I was doing that, it wasn’t because I thought it was funny, it was because I was super pissed off at him. So there would be a quote of his that he said to me, then next to it I’d have written “fuck you, you think you can tell me what to fucking do!” I was an angst-y journal writing kid. The reality is though, when I look back at those journals now, the ones I still can find, most of the time when he was pissed off at me, I was doing something pretty stupid, like trying to fill up a water balloon with pee. He responded to that one with, “You can’t fill up a fucking balloon like that, and even if you could, I’d just take it and throw it at you for doing it.” *
and
***You and I both started HolyTaco a couple years ago, and now we’ve recently taken positions writing for Maxim.com. Is all this new-found Internet fame going to make you a pain in my ass?
**
Well, the thing is I don’t have any creative input on shitmydadsays, other than to just pick the thing he said that I liked the best from that day. So, I can’t really have an ego, because I didn’t really DO anything.
People tend to think I’m a funny guy. There are two reasons why, the first is I’m usually cracking wise, so if you go by the law of average, if I say 100 things which I think are funny, some are going to be and most will be forgotten.
The second is manipulation, if I want to crack a funny joke, I don’t say it. I think about it, then I start a conversation and I can direct it in such a way that someone asks me something exactly as I want, THEN I can say the perfect response.
So you see it’s not like you’re always coming up with them. In reality it’s a mixture of quantity and manipulation to achieve quality