Joke-Husband/Wife Scandal

“Ring, Ring, ‘hello.’ ‘Hey honey, this is daddy, is mommy near the phone?’ ‘No daddy, she’s upstairs in the bedroom with Uncle Paul.’ After a brief pause, daddy said ‘honey, you haven’t got an Uncle Paul.’ So the girl says, ‘oh yes I do, he’s upstairs with mommy right now.’ [Brief Pause] Daddy says ‘huhhh well this is what I want you to do. Put the phone down on the table, go upstairs, knock on the bedroom door, and shout to mommy, Daddy’s car just pulled into the driveway. ‘Ok daddy, just a minute.’ A few minutes later, girl comes back to the phone, ‘I did it daddy,’ ‘and what happened honey?’ ‘Mommy got all scared and jumped out of bed with no clothes on and ran around screaming. Then she tripped over the rug and hit her head on the dresser. And now she isn’t moving at all.’ ‘OH MY GOD,’ said daddy, ‘what happened to Uncle Paul?’ ‘Well he jumped out of bed with no clothes on too, he was all scared and he jumped out of the back window and into the swimming pool. But, I guess he didn’t know that we took out all of the water last week to clean it. He hit the bottom of the pool and I think he’s dead. [Very long pause]. The daddy says, ‘swimming pool? Is this 4865731?’ ‘No,’ the little girl says, ‘I think you have the wrong number.’”

Terry said he learned this joke through an e-mail from an old friend. He said that sometimes his friends will send him jokes that they believe he will enjoy. So, when he opened up his e-mail account today, he found a new joke waiting for him. He said that this joke came from his sister who lives about 10 miles west from the city he grew up in the middle of the Iowa cornfields. Terry’s sister regularly sends him e-mails with various items in it. It just so happens that this time, he received a joke that he thought was very funny.

Terry said a good time to perform this joke is in social gathering with friends, co-workers, or family members. He said that the joke performer must be able to be enthusiastic and act out the character’s voices. For instance, whenever the little girl is speaking to the dad, he must be able to talk in a quieter, adolescent voice. The overall performance of the joke helps excite the audience members. By telling it with great enthusiasm, the joke will be a success.

Terry thinks this joke is very clever and exciting because he was completely surprised by the punch line. He thinks that it is a good joke because there is great anticipation to find out what will happen at the end. He also believes that this joke represents irony in the sense that although the father called the wrong house, the wife was still cheating on her own husband with the so-called Uncle Paul. But, he also thinks that it also represents stupidity as the man did not even know his own phone number.

I agree with Terry that this joke is very clever and that it represents both irony and stupidity. But, I also think it has an important lesson within it. Parents should never make their kids do inappropriate tasks such as telling their mom that their dad is in the driveway. The way the father manipulated the child shows how disastrous the outcome should be. Parents should take problems into their own hands and not rely on their children to be the mediating force between them. Because of the father’s actions, the cheating mother and man were both seriously injured or killed. I think this joke tells people to think before acting because the father clearly did not think or else he would not have had his daughter tell her mother that he was in the driveway.