The Dad Jokes of Dad's Jokes


'How long have you been driving roughly?'

How many times I heard that in my life, I've long since lost count. Certain biological and cultural qualities establish the concept of a father.

You need to have fathered or raised a child. You need to repeat your stock standard jokes at every conceivable opportunity. Finally, long suffering family members express annoyance every time you do it (which only encourages you further).

My childhood Labrador, Amigo, loved chasing tennis balls (I'll bet most of us remember him with up to five or six inside his enormous mouth), which made playing cricket in the backyard almost impossible unless he was asleep in the garage.

If Frank was outside too and we wanted him to control the dog so we could play we'd call out; 'Can you call the dog, dad?', and his immediate response was 'dad! dad!'.

At every mention of the insult 'p*ss off', his immediate response was 'I'll have a whiskey, then'.

And if there was a near miss or eyebrow raising moment in a car, he'd immediately say 'how long have you been driving roughly?'

Now, decades later, I can't help myself.

Just like I said at Uncle Bob's funeral about how I instinctively say the chefs are having a meeting about whether they think we can afford to eat there or that the supermarket's run out of food every time one of my grandkids asks me when dinner is, whenever they do something boisterous, ungraceful or ungainly, I can feel the impulse as viscerally as the snatching back of one's hand from a hot stove.

If there's a crash from a falling toy or a baby doll gets discarded with all the care of a soccer ball kicked across a field I'll say 'how long have you been playing roughly?'. If they trip over their feet it's 'how long have you been walking roughly?'.

And just a couple of years from now when the first one gets his learner's permit – and in the decade or more after that when his sisters get theirs – I'll be watching for every speed bump taken a bit too fast, the brake applied a fraction too late at every red light and every lane change that isn't checked properly and ends up in an abrupt return to the lane of origin, all so I can let my father speak again across the years as I utter that fateful epithet...

'How long have you been driving roughly?'

I think that, as much as anything else, makes me a Dad, and I like to think he'd be overjoyed I'm doing it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A colourful character

The best Christmas in ages