Petri Dad

One thing that's cool and horrifying about my dad is that he likes to joke, mainly in the form of really bad puns. Like groaning is often the only legitimate response to some of the things he says. And my kids have already identified this tendency. Last week I said something corny, and my elder son said, "Mom, that was almost as bad as a Beepa joke." I'm pretty sure my dad would feel some pride in hearing that.

Every now and then, though, the bad pun is actually really, really good. For instance, one thing that's been so great in my life lately is that my sister-in-law had to do a presentation on a microbe for a class (microbiology, quite obviously). She asks me a lot about stuff from this class, because it's kind of my thing. I was relating to my dad how much I'd been enjoying her project, from the beginning where she was trying to remember which bug it was, telling me that it was something that caused a drippy nose (this is English as a second language SIL, she looked it up on her translator), and then I found out she was talking about gonorrhea which is more like a drippy penis, to the middle where everything I edited for her I sent back to her with the heading, "Lulu has gonorrhea", to the end where we spent about an hour on the phone working on pronunciation of "vagina", "rectum", and "anus" (that was a tricky one--she wanted to start with a long "e"--eeenus).

So my dad, after listening to all this, asked my sister in law how the presentation went. She told him it was fine, not too bad. He gave it a moment for effect, then, "Did they clap?" Ba-dum-bum.

It took him a while to recover from that one. And I'll admit, I laughed pretty hard myself.