Jokes (Caturday)

Big Cat, Little Cat: Bad Jokes

Dumb Jokes

I have a particular relationship with bad jokes. I come from a family of bad-joke-tellers. And I swore I would be better. That sounds like a joke; or the premise for one. But it’s actually not. My parents and grandparents and uncles and so on would say any old pun:

“Hi, Grandpa!”
“How high?”

The dumber the better. It almost seemed like a chore sometimes: you have to tell any joke that comes to mind, whether it’s good or not, and everyone else has to groan. That didn’t seem fun to me. I’m not faulting them; just describing. Kids need a way to rebel against their families; usually more than one. One of mine was that I worked at understanding why a joke worked or did not, and tried to be better. This isn’t a triumphal narrative. Nor did I grow up to be a successful comedian. But I do think it made me a keener observer of humor than I might otherwise have been.

So I present this comic as an example of an extremely marginal joke. A case-study, as it were. One that almost isn’t funny but still somehow seems to me clever and fresh and silly enough to make me giggle. Or maybe I’m just getting old and turning into my parents, and one symptom of that is an increasing fondness for less-and-less-funny jokes. That was always a possibility, albeit a dim one, haunting the corners of my mind.

Lapping it Up… or Not

Ironically, as bad as this joke is, none of my older relatives would be lapping it up like… well, like a cat with a bowl of cream, because they wouldn’t know what a MegaZord is. So I’m cutting off the older crowd who wouldn’t like this joke because of its topical reference to a 90s kids’ martial arts show. And I’m cutting off the younger crowd that doesn’t like terrible puns. Well… some of them do. But other than that I’m aiming almost exactly for my demographic. Which feels weird because:

1. I just wanted to do a fun thing with wordplay not think of this in socioeconomic terms; and yet increasingly I think of everything in socioeconomic terms. That’s not a bad thing but it’s exhausting.
2. I don’t usually like jokes that are aimed at my generation. If you’re ever thinking of sending me a meme about what 90s kids “be like”‘? Fine. Send it to me anyway. I’ll probably laugh! But not willingly.
3. I never liked the Power Rangers.

Really never. Not even for a minute. I had an older brother who didn’t like it and I was of that age where I didn’t have any of my own opinions so… I wasn’t able to like it, either.

Anyway… My Take on Jokes

There’s also a bit on the difference between “funny” and “silly.” I don’t know what the difference is yet but as far as I can tell: when something is funny, someone is always the butt of the joke. When something is silly, everyone can laugh and relax. The older I get, the more I like silly over funny.

You might find this interesting or not. But I certainly do. What makes something funny, or not. And whether that changes for a particular person or group? There’s a strange kind of prejudice bound up in humor: if everyone laughs then, as a rule, the joke wasn’t particularly funny. Does that make me a snob? Yeah, probably. And being a bit of a snob is, to add to the frustration, also a bit of a family trait.

*sigh…

With some things you can’t win.

Jewish Jokes

One thing I’ve noticed is I prefer Jewish jokes to other kinds.

Christians: Have you heard the good news?
Jews: I’ve got good news and bad news.

So here are some of my favorites

And elderly Jewish man walks into confession and says: “Listen, Father, I need to tell you something. I run the dry cleaning business down the street and the other day this young woman comes in. Maybe twenty-five, thirty years old. We get to talking and we hit it off. Out of nowhere, we’re in the back room, fucking each other. And I mean fucking each other. I felt like a man of thirty again!”
The old man waits for a moment, and then the priest says: “Sorry but… you’re Jewish right?”
“Right”
“So why are you telling me this?”
“Telling YOU…? I’m telling EVERYBODY!”

Okay one more:

A bunch of Jews are sitting in a restaurant. The waiter comes over and says: “Is anything alright?”

Description

So there’s these four panels, right? And in each panel, these two cats are sitting on a cushion, right? A big orange one on the left with kind of a smile on his face and a little grey on the right with a sour expression.

Panel 1

So the big orange says: “Why do you always pick one of Human-Mom’s legs and sit on it for hours?”
And the little grey responds: “I do it for her sake.”

Panel 2

The big one says: “I don’t get it.”
“Well,” says the grey, “I attach to one leg…”

Panel 3

“And Middle Cat attaches to the other.”

Panel 4

“And that’s the closest Human-Mom will get to being a MegaZord in this lifetime.”