Why I Love Corny Jokes

               Do you remember any of those times when your dad said something and laughed, as if you knew why it was funny or important, and you ended up laughing with him? Do you recall those times when your dad told a story or a joke, and, even though you knew the punch line already, you laughed aloud when he gave it to you again? Do you have any memories of your father talking about a thing that was before your time, a thing that you could not understand, and yet, because your father told you about it, you remained interested?

                I can recall many of these things. Often they came in response to words that I said. For example, if I happened to say, “silver,” my dad would often respond with the same line: “Silver. By Walter de la Mare.” And he'd throw back his head in laughter. Or if I happened to say a certain phrase or discuss a certain idea, he would nod and quote some book or film using the same (or nearly the same) phrase, often totally out of context.

                And then there were his jokes (which he is still fond of telling). I would think to myself, “Dad, you know you’ve told us this a hundred times,” or, “Ah, c’mon…that was pretty lame…that was so corny.” And yet I find myself laughing or smiling every time. It’s a strange phenomenon in behavior, really. How is it that something we have heard a hundred times can still be funny to us? How is it that something seemingly irrelevant to the rest of our conversation can end up being the only thing we remembered about it?

                The answer is pretty simple. In fact, as I was typing the above paragraph, my wife came in and read the title of this post, and answered it by saying (rather matter-of-factly), “Because your dad does.”

                This is such an interesting answer to me, and I think it is exactly the right answer. If I had read those things in a joke book, I would have laughed or smiled for a moment, and then I would have forgotten all about them. If I had heard such quotes or phrases on the radio or perhaps in someone’s Facebook status, I would have nodded at their simplistic brilliance for an instant before moving on to other things. But I can still remember jokes and stories and quips told to me by my father when I was only a small boy.

                The fact is, my remembrance of these things does not prove my own senses’ reliability, because I have forgotten so many other similar jokes and sayings from many other places. What I believe this all points to, inevitably, is the relationship I had with my dad growing up, and also the relationship I still have with him today. The words in of themselves can be simple and, perhaps, dull. But they are my father’s words, and they are his words to me. At times, especially when I was younger, his words sometimes didn’t make much sense—still I laughed, even though he probably knew I didn’t quite understand what he was getting at. The knowledge of such things didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that my dad had just cued me in on something mysterious and unknown to me. He might have joked with a co-worker or a friend, or with my mother, but in this case, he didn’t. Rather than choose his equal, he chose to say some strange new phrase to his son. And now that I am older, and have since learned either the meaning behind his tales or the incongruousness of them, I have grown to appreciate such things, and to cherish them. They were once only letters on a page in some Reader’s Digest column. Now they have become my father’s, and they are addressed not to a mailing list or to a social network, but to me.

                And this is, I believe, the method of our eternal Father, who gives good gifts to his children, and warms their hearts with his words, sometimes a hundred times over, and sometimes through mystery, but at all times, and in all ways, through intimacy.