Photo by Tatiana Syrikova.
My dream job would be to clean mirrors. I could really see myself doing that.
However, for the time being, I’m under contract to write occasional columns for the Pagosa Daily Post, covering a variety of topics, including impending events such as Father’s Day and the decline and fall of the American Empire.
My columns occasionally make reference to my close personal relationships… with my cat Roscoe, and with my ex-wife Darlene. All important topics. Some more important than others.
At one point, I told Darlene she was a ‘newspaper’. Because she had a new issue every day.
Ha, ha, ha.
This Sunday will be Father’s Day here in the U.S., the one day of the year when I’m proud to be a father. It’s also a day when some members of the male species who begat offspring will take the opportunity to tell dad jokes, a form of humor typically forbidden during the remainder of the year.
‘Dad jokes’ generally depend on puns, involve maybe two sentences at the most, and require minimal intelligence on the part of the teller. Thus, making these jokes appealing to adult males. You can tell a dad joke in mixed company, and in front to children, and no one gets offended. Unfortunately, no one will laugh, either. Because, let’s face it, dad jokes are bad jokes.
My own father was a great joke teller, but he never told ‘dad jokes’. His jokes were outrageously funny and sometimes involved a lengthy and complicated setup, but were ill-suited for mixed audiences, especially audiences that included children. Very often, the joke referred to bodily functions, and all too often, to people representing certain cultural stereotypes. I’d estimate that a good 20% of them involved a traveling salesman… and a similar proportion featured a doctor diagnosing an uncomfortable health issue. A fair number of them took place in a bar and involved men and women who had superseded the normal alcohol limit.
When I first heard the term, ‘dad jokes’, I assumed they were talking about the type of jokes my dad told. But, no. Not even close.
I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. I’ll let you know.
As it turns out, you can still hear plenty of politically- and culturally-incorrect jokes on YouTube, if you happen to stumble upon the right algorithm.
But I fear our younger generation is growing up on a diet of dad jokes. This does not bode well for the American Empire.
For thousands of year, historians have been documenting the rise and fall of empires — the Mongol Empire, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire, and of course, our favorite, the British Empire — and there’s pretty strong evidence that dad jokes became a dominant form of humor in the decades immediately preceding each empire’s demise.
Luckily, we have a team of honest-to-goodness comedians who meet regularly at the White House for Cabinet meetings. According to a televised discussion between HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice President JD Vance, the funniest person in those meetings is none other than President Donald Trump, but apparently Secretary of State Marco Rubio comes a close second.
During that same interview, Vice President Vance related a gut-busting story about a particular Cabinet meeting.
Vance: “Well, I don’t know if you saw this video circulating on social media, but the President met the president of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in the Oval Office, a couple of days ago. And he asks him, ‘Well, how many wives do you have?’
“And it’s, like, what an amazing question. Amazing comedic timing. There are layers to it. There’s meta-humor to it.
“But we’ve got a lot of good humor in the Cabinet…”
I bet Ahmed laughed his head off.
Ahmed’s wife, Latifa, may not have found the joke funny, however. It might have felt like a dad joke, to her.
This does not bode well, I think, for the future of the American Empire. But the decline and fall of the American Empire is totally not suitable subject matter for dad jokes.
Wives, on the other hand, ought to be.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.