Cameron_Columns-Excerpts_Layout 1 5/19/11 8:28 AM Page 16
Column: Father’s Day Humor
When I was a little girl I had breakfast with my father on Sundays. It was a special time and part of that
was the menu: we ate donuts. In our sugar-free house this indulgence was permitted only on Sundays for
efficiency’s sake. My father hated to be late, and so, in theory, this simple breakfast was a way to get us to
church on time. But as my father was prompt, my mother was not, and so I was alone at the table with my
Dad on Sunday.
Part of this special time was the joke we shared every Sunday--and it was every Sunday for years.
ou need to know that my father had a classical education and tried to teach his children Latin. But each
Sunday as I would take my first powdered sugar donut from the white bakery box, he would say, “Did you
know that Caesar liked donuts?” And every week I’d say, “No, he did?” And Dad would say, “Yes, Caesar
and Brutus had donuts for breakfast every day. But one day Brutus was late and the donuts were all gone,
so Brutus said to Caesar, “How many donuts did you eat? And Caesar replied, “et tu Brute”.
What, you’re not laughing? This was a side splitter in my family. It’s not a “you had to be there” situation;
it’s more like “You had to be born there.” It’s Dad Humor.
Most families have Dad Humor. In my husband’s family their Dad joke came at dinner. Each night as
Mr. Cameron would push away from the table he’d say, “Well, if that was dinner, I’ve had it.” I also learned
from the Cameron clan another Dad line still used when anyone puts on his or her glasses: “Well, I’m going
to make a spectacle of myself.”
Yes, these are groaners and that’s because dad humor is often based on children’s love of word play. It
works because of the linguistic advantage that adults have in those early years when kids are developing a
sense of syntax and discovering that words can have more than one meaning. Dad humor is the linguistic
equivalent of Camp Style; it works because it is bad.
Hence another of my father’s jokes that made us laugh as tykes and groan as teens. It was the perfect
response to children who would whine, “Daddy, I’m hungry”, and he would say, with proffered hand, “Well,
Howdy, I’m Mr. Oklota, nice to meet you!” The goofiness stopped the whining.
We know that humor is curative and that it has an effect on our immune system, but these jokes, in their
essential dumbness have an equivalent effect on our psyche. The silliness of the bad joke can be counted
on. People tell me that they knew their parent was seriously ill or entering senility when the old jokes
stopped.
But if these jokes and puns are so dumb why, often in midlife, do we retell them? Why do I tell “et tu
Brute” to people who never knew my father? Why does Peter use the spectacle pun each time he looks for
his glasses?
These jokes become dearer as we age because they warm and charm us; they hold pieces of our
fathers and of our selves. These simple jokes bear complex cargo; they preserve in just a few words what
once was and what our father meant to us.
Today, if your Dad is still around, just laugh at his jokes and smile to yourself.