Comedy Central

Several months ago I shared, with bizarre pride, the news that my sons had taken up comedy as a new pastime, memorizing their favorite Jim Gaffigan bit about buying toilet paper in bulk and repeating it ad nauseam.  Remember?



It was really cute at first.  It was still pretty cute at "second".  But after three consecutive weeks of "does that guy ever leave the bathroom?" following me around as I navigated church, the post office and the grocery store, I was nearly ready to trade in "comedic Cael" for the original, more troublesome model.

As it turns out, he never did give up on striving to be funny.  I guess it's in his blood, because Joel has always been a class clown, life-of-the-party type.  And while I'm not usually one to toot my own horn, I picked up on humor quickly in junior high and always worked hard to keep my friends laughing.

You do what you have to do when you look like this.

Mercifully, Cael's sense of humor wasn't borne from frizzy hair or six years of braces, but simply from an innate desire for attention.  So thus far in his life, he has been spared the torture of being laughed at in favor of laughing along.

In the last few days, however, Cael has grown more confident in his idea of "funny", and has begun creating his own material.  As his main audience, and someone who enjoys comedy, I first found his Seinfeld-esque observational humor to be somewhat funny.  He understood that by drawing parallels between otherwise unrelated things, he'd found his comedic niche and exploited that fact each time he opened his mouth.

"Mom, carrots are weird.  And guess what?  What do you call a carrot that's blue?"

"I don't know.  What?"

"A basket!"

Ba dum, chh...

I wasn't sure if he was attempting to tell jokes or alerting me to a possible medical problem that had gone thus far undiagnosed.  But as the next few moments and the next few bizarre jokes unfolded, his new calling was clear.

"What is an book that stinks?"

"What?"

"A chicken!  And here's another one, Mommy!"

Great.  He's anything if not persistent, and my acting skills weren't good enough to feign amusement all day.

"What's a blue sofa with hair on it?"

"What is it?"

"A punk!"

That almost worked.  Maybe there was still hope.

"Okay, Cael.  Last one."

"Okay.  What do you call chips and salsa that's spicy?"

"You tell me, dude."

"Fire in your mouth.  Or fire in your underpants!!!"

Tickets go on sale next week, folks.