jokes, never dad jokes, the whole cultural phenomenon of dad jokes is lost
on me, corny jokes are for moms only
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The other day Farmsister repeated one of the funny weird little aphorisms
she and I grew up with. Our mom was full of these weird little sayings.
Some of them, now that I’m out in the world, it turns out everyone’s mom
says. Some of them not so much.
“Oh,” Farmsister said to her daughter, “if your nose is itchy, that means
you’re gonna kiss a fool.”
Farmkid, who spends a ton of time with Grandma, frowned at her. “What?”
Farmsister repeated it, and Kid was like “Uhhhh, that’s not how the saying
goes. It’s if your nose is cold you’re going to kiss a fool.”
They argued back and forth desultorily about it, but as it happens,
Farmsister calls Mom every day since Dad died, and so she made her daily
phone call, and said, “Oh, Mom, what is it that your nose does when you’re
going to kiss a fool?”
“Oh it’s cold,” Mom said.
Farmsister contemplated that for a moment. “Are you sure it’s not itchy?”
“Oh,” Mom said. She thought a moment, and said “I’m pretty sure it’s cold.”
Just now, several days later, Farmsister was puttering around putting away
dishes in the kitchen, and I was leaned on the counter petting cat with my
foot while BIL poked at his phone in the chair nearby. “OH,” she said.
“What,” I said, alarmed.
“If your nose is BLANK,” she said, “you’re going to kiss a fool.”
BIL, baffled, stared between the two of us like we’d grown four heads.
“What?”
“Itchy,” I said. “If your nose is itchy you’re gonna kiss a fool.”
“THANK YOU,” she said, and picked up the phone to call Mom before realizing
it’s really too late in the day. “I’m gonna tell her that tomorrow.”
Yeah, she always said itchy when we were kids.
(It’s a joke setup, because of course you’re going to use this as a
punchline the next time it comes up that you kiss someone. It’s a very old
joke setup. Mom has a lot of these partial jokes, because her father was
apparently hilarious, but died in 1969, and Mom doesn’t remember most of
the whole jokes.)
(If anyone knows the joke to which the punchline is “Takes kidneys!” when
someone does something boneheaded, that would solve a fairly deep-seated
family mystery.)
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