The Mother of All Blog Posts

Normally I'd save a post like this for Mother's Day, but I don't feel like it.

During my school years I spent much of my time trying to be funny. In many cases I ripped off humor from other sources, including

• Mad magazine
• Bugs Bunny cartoons
• The Unknown Comic from The Gong Show, about whom I might dedicate a later post 
• Stuff I'd heard from other people

Once in a while I'd come up with an original idea. The following post is about a humorous idea I briefly launched in sixth grade.


A BRIEF DIGRESSION ABOUT MOTHER JOKES
During the time I was in sixth grade, the most offensive thing you could do to a fellow student was insult his mother. Personally, I was never more offended by jokes about my mother than jokes about, say, my father, and not because I didn't hold my mother in high esteem. But the kids I went to school with, their mothers were sacred. "Your mother" jokes were rampant, and they could often lead to fights.

I swapped mother jokes with my friends, but we weren't trying to insult anyone. Amusingly, most of the time I didn't understand the jokes. Take this one:

Your mother's like a phonebooth in the rain: wet rubbers going in and out.

I had no idea what that meant. Even if I did know what that meant, I don't think I would have concentrated much on the actual imagery, only that it's supposed to insult the other party.

There was an old Warner Brothers cartoon where crazy familial insults were exchanged. I don't remember it as the one below, but the following cartoon, which I pulled from a Romanian site and is thankfully not dubbed into Romanian, contains a number of outdated and possibly offensive insults, including Porky Pig's topper (at the 6:50 mark, almost at the end): "Eh, your sister drives a pickle wagon!"

Anyway. One time, I was at the bus stop and when a different bus drove by I'd insulted the mother of one of the kids (we'll call him Jasper) on that bus (the window was open) with the following joke:

Your mother's like a gun: two cocks, and she blows!

Note that this joke, at the time, made even less sense to me than the one about the phonebooth and the rubbers, but I knew there was something offensive about it. I bore no ill will toward Jasper, but the time was just ripe to spring it.

This had caused quite a scandal. Jasper, who was a couple of years younger than me, and his brother, who was my brother's age, were both, as my mother would label children of this sort, "troublemakers." The kind who would fight someone for far less than in the chivalric defense of their mother's honor. So I quickly and humbly apologized, probably within a day or two.

A week or two after that, my family and Jasper's family were at church together; they were a row behind me. I noticed that the mother was with them, but there was no father. I don't think their father lived with them, or he was one of those guys who worked all the time as a mechanic or something, which probably had something to do with why the kids were always in trouble. I looked at the mother and she seemed very tired, very pious. It was then that I actually felt bad for saying mean things about a woman I'd never met.

ANYWAY, THE OTHER "MOTHER" THING
Oh yeah. So, the thing I did for a while in sixth grade was go up to somebody, let's say Jim Johnson, and I'd say: "Your mother!"

And Jim would go, "WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

And I'd quickly reply, "...is Mrs. Johnson."

And he'd be relieved, and unclench his fist, and go, "Oh yeah! She is! Good one!"

I did that bit for a while until I pulled it on someone whose mother had died. It wasn't as bad as you'd think it would be, because she knew I had no idea her mother had died. It probably helped that the mother died some time ago and it was obvious that I had no idea (this was after a school merge, so I knew the girl for only like two months), so I didn't come off like a total creep. But at that point I realized it was time to retire that line of humor.

In the meantime, enjoy this little ditty from Mr. T regarding mothers. It probably was released while I was in sixth grade, because that's when The A-Team was pretty big, so I should have heeded the message.