LJ Idol Entry, Week One: "Jayus"

Jayus: “From Indonesian, meaning a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.”

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Hey, look, a commercial on TV for something called Requip. That must mean to quip again.
I think it's actually for restless legs or something.
No, did you hear me? It means to quip again.

My dad makes the worst jokes.

Though he's been making them all my life, I can't remember most of the actual jokes; they're not only terrible, they're transient. A word or two come up in conversation, and he twists them around, manages to make some sad corkscrew of a pun out of them, and then ignores us as we roll our eyes. And as we try to suppress our giggles. The so-bad-it's-good model of humor has been a constant current through all of my remembered years.

(The truth is, we don't even know how many bad jokes he's spared us over the years. Occasionally you'll see him laugh to himself, apparently over nothing. "What is it?", you'll inquire, and he'll reply, "Just told myself a joke." "Well, what was it?" "It wouldn't be funny outside my head.")

And unfortunately for my wife, these are things I've picked up. I too make terrible horrible no-good very bad puns. "So what?" she might inquire of me, and I'll respond, "Sew buttons." By now it's not really even a joke anymore; it's a mantra. A tradition.

It's a comforting thing, somehow, this passage of bad-jokery from one generation to the next. ("Did you get your hair cut?" someone might ask him. "I got all of them cut," he'll reply.) We might groan, we might pretend the next bad joke will cause us to snap, but inside we're laughing, because it's who Dad is -- the easygoing guy who brings the puns to the table when he's happy. And he's happy most of the time. And that has made our lives happier. The bad jokes are part of what family means to me. And I have willingly carried them over into my life and my home.

My wife λ and I are planning on having a child soon. It's an incredibly scary idea. I'm terrified that I might not be able to handle it, that I'll break down, that I'm too high-maintenance and too prone to mood swings to handle caring for a little person who will depend on myself and my wife for everything, from wiping their butt to gaining a safe, joyful attitude as they move into the world. But then one day I might say to λ, out of the blue --

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Knock.
Knock who?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Knock.
Knock who?
Knock knock...

-- and λ will giggle and groan at the same time. And then she'll tell me, "Our kid will love that one."

And it calms me down, thinking of how my parents managed to raise us, thinking about what a good job they did, how safe and loved they made me feel and how important that was as I grew up and began to live independently. And those bad jokes were a part of all of that process. It was part of our family, a familiar ritual that drew us closer together, just by virtue of who Dad was and who we were when we were together. And it's a million little things just like that that helped to create our warm, happy home. I think I've learned some of those things and can pass them down now. I hope I have.

So I think the bad jokes are a pretty good thing. Obviously, there are a whole lot of things that are objectively scary about parenting, things I don't know how to do yet. But even if I am going to have to pick up 99% of it on the fly, there is this one thing I know I can handle: I can tell bad jokes.

It's a start.

(no subject)

Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, is dying. Please please please don't picket his funeral.

Let's remember why all the funeral pickets were awful: because they made the funerals hell for those who were grieving. Picketing a funeral does nothing to the dead. But the people who grieve for Phelps are not all terrible. Many of his children have left the church,* but that doesn't mean that in some complicated way they may not still love their father, and whether they do or not, they deserve closure. A funeral can provide that. But not if it takes place with hatred being shouted in the background.

And above all: Phelps's protests were based in hate. LGBTQ activism is based in love, not hate.

Please don't picket Phelps's funeral.

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*Incidentally, VERY weird detail in that article: Phelps himself was excommunicated from the church in the middle of last year. No one outside the WBC knows the reason. Some are theorizing he had a change of heart, but that seems improbable to me, after a lifetime of fiercely determined hatred. Very interesting though.