Reasons you will hate me

there's just something about desert family holidays that brings out the comedian in all of us.

my mum spent our two week sojourn pretending to be an old russian spinster.

enjoy it while it lasts.

x

my brother took our mother with him to an academic conference in manchester last year. of course, for months, in the lead, up we all spoke in MUNchUsteRR accents, preferably working in the phrase "me bruther's taking me moom to MUNCHUSTERRRRR" whenever possible.

no, this was not at all tedious.

my dad, however, is not into the accent thing. but we shit stir him whenever possible about his incorrect way of saying things. we do this by putting the stress on the wrong syllables in certain melbourne suburb names as a tribute to his wrong pronunciation,
such as ash-bur-TON instead of ash-BUR-ton.

as you can imagine, he really laughs along with these jibes.

Dear Mr Fits, please replace any reference to any Monty Python members with impressions of Stewie from the Family Guy or if this is too topic please try Robin Williams doing Elma Fudd impersonating Bruce Springstein.

At least he doesn't do puns.

My dad can't have a conversation with anyone without bad punning.

My father also uses a variety of sometimes-amusing accents and gestures and he provides additional entertainment by continuing to chuckle to himself about his own jokes for HOURS after they are first made.

We take the punitive approach in our family: several words and phrases were banned during our last camping trip (some fifteen years ago) due to excessive use.

Do they make you feel 13 again? Are you walking five steps behind them because nobody can tell you are with them despite following them around?

God Bless – there really is a default standard for dad jokes, isn't there?

But does he do it in public?

My Dad once picked me up from a teenage party (circa. 1989) and entered the house, jumped onto the dance floor and said. "Who's a groover man?"

That last one is Well embarrassing and worthy of my Dad, too..

Mine likes to pepper any conversations with 'the lingo', always getting the context, intonation etc completely arse-up eg:

"That's really BLING isn't it?" (to his RMIT students, at least 8 months after everyone stopped using it)
"I thought it was quite Western Anime in style. Don't ya reckon?"
"Wow, what a blogger!" (referring to a posting, not a person)

Everybody thinks he's cute, except for our family.

Hey, go easy on us dads. We're responsible for stuff. And that.

There is a gland in the male human body, as yet undiscovered, which is triggered by the holding of newborn infants with similar genetic material. It may be an unidentified pheremone which spurs this gland into action, we just haven't done the research.

What this gland does, is release a chemical into the brain that unlocks picture perfect memories of our own fathers' behaviour, and an overwhelming desire to imitate them. This may be a survival response, as, if we have grown to produce offspring, our upbringing may not have been the misunderstood nightmare we all remember it to be.

It stretches beyond "dad jokes" to things like informing your kids on long car trips, that if they "don't settle down in the back there, they can get out and walk" and helpfully pointing out if they complain of thirst that there's "plenty of water in the tap".

I did have a point in there somewhere, but right now, I feel like a coffee.

(If you didn't just get the urge to tell me "That's funny, you don't look like a coffee", you are clearly not a dad)

Oh dear. I did have the urge to tell you that, and i'm most DEFINITELY not a dad...

Hold up!
Where's Toby?!
He's the KING OF DAD jokes.

I love my parents and think they are the radest things ever and love them to bits and like spending time with tham a lot. As long as that time does not exceed 4 hours.

My father was a truly forboding figure in the field of dad-joke telling but didn't always get his lines right. I remember when I was about 13 he'd had a rare turn on the sauce after work with his mates and had come home about 10. My younger sister was being dropped off by her friends notoriously bitchy mother and he answered the front door, happy and ready to have a friendly (if somewhat slurred) chat. The woman immediatley jumped on him, saying accusingly 'You're drunk!' so Dad tried to go with the 'Yeah well you're ugly and I'll be sober in the morning' defence but got a little lost somewhere around the middle. Swaying around like a perfect stereotype movie drunk he said 'Yeah well you're ugly...... so just fuck off... you ugly bitch...'

Moment of silence and disbelief.

'and you're daughter's ugly too'

Seeing him do this at 13 was one of the great formative experiences in my life.

And I still can't go past a cemetary without my father's voice ringing inmy ears 'It's the dead centre of town... people are dying to get in there...'.

i like duckmysick's story. and on TLS's dad-gland idea, i'm thinking there's some primal genetic memory at work, where they all reach back into a pool of common expressions, such as:

"[shut the] door! were you born in a tent? [cave?/swamp?]"

"we'll cross that bridge when we come to it"

"pipe down or you'll get a thumping" [this one was bred out of them in just one generation it seems]

"can't you see i'm reading the paper"

TLS's dad gland theory would explain a lot.

For example, where a six month old child has just attempted to feed himself with pureed kumara for the first time and he is covered head to toe in orange goo, this gland releases a chemical to the brain which compels the father to go and get a camera instead of, say, a damp cloth.

However, it doesn't explain my tendency to say "I know its bean soup, but what is it now" at every opportunity. I started doing this at least 15 years before my children arrived. Was I just warming up for becoming a dad?

Dad jokes are perhaps the best part of fatherhood.

Sometimes it can be possible to go too far - usually by forgetting the age of your target audience. When asked by a child if you know where one of their belongings is, it may be tempting to ask in turn "Is my face red?" (in the hope you'll get a response in the negative). All fathers should know that the customary declaration that follows is "It's not up my arse, then"

Explaining to a teary four year old that you would never actually put Maisy Mouse up your quoit can be a little distressing for all concerned.

Although getting them to pull your finger is suitable for all age groups

i'm not craig, i'm interested to note that your dad-gland is obviously a bit more evolved than others as you mention a damp cloth. often, the dad-gland, or indeed male-gland, is particularly unhelpful when it comes to cleaning up liquid spills. mostly the male-gland doesn't distinguish between a clean tea-towel for table spillages or the current dishwashing sponge for floor spillages when it should be paper towel for the first and the old sponge which is under every sink in the country for the floor.

i feel a poll coming on.

My father was a self-centred, uncommunicative, willfully ignorant redneck who did virtually nothing but sit next to the radio with a form guide and a bottle of beer. He wouldn't have known who Arnold Schwarzenegger or Basil Fawlty were let alone tried to impersonate them.

Today is the tenth anniversary of his death. I haven't missed him for a second.

anon. whats the moral of this story? a bad joke is better than no joke? they don't talk about arnie and basil on the radio? anniversaries are nice?
i guess it does seem to put things into perspective.
my dad was also a perpetrator of RUSBJ (repetitive use of short bad jokes) but really his material was at the minimum entry level. i think he should have had meetings with the other dads to come up with a wider range. conferences or something.

anon. whats the moral of this story? a bad joke is better than no joke? they don't talk about arnie and basil on the radio? anniversaries are nice?
i guess it does seem to put things into perspective.
my dad was also a perpetrator of RUSBJ (repetitive use of short bad jokes) but really his material was at the minimum entry level. i think he should have had meetings with the other dads to come up with a wider range. conferences or something.

wow... i found anonymouses comment debilitating.i mean my parents arent complete fuckwits but they do keep their brain in oxygen tight tupperwear containers. this is my 1st eva blog response/contribution i feel alittle dirty but it is the only forseeable way of avoiding my homework besides leaving my house.the comments are all encompassingly funny.i feel here i shld interject with something witty and anecdotal bout my pezzes hmmm..........................................................................my Conversation w my motha today consisted of "mum im getting a tat."(groans equatting to s/thing like regularly escaping the vocal chords of an I.B.S. sufferer )i said but mum its cultural
"but you're not a moari dear"
"its going to be a bird"(she's a twitcher)
no response.
i guess the thing one must ponder after conversations like this is just because she sqeezed me outa her cunt over the corse of 24hrs of intolerable almighty groundbreaking pain, does that mean i have any connection to her intellectual spiritual or emotional being?but really who else is ganna lend me 5 grand on 10minutes notice.dont dis the pezzas man

m-dawg

peep your post from january regarding the b-grrrl, mike and sass, pro skaters, etc. it was funny reading that sheeyat...

how are you!?

Ahh gawd love 'im. He sounds adorable.