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Humor July 2012

What’s So Funny?

By Karen Telleen-Lawton

In other words, Dad didn’t get it and passed it to Mom, who found it too annoyingly true to be humorous.

Some jokes comfortably span the generation gap and instead trip up on the gender gap. That’s what happened recently when I clipped out what I thought was a hilarious New Yorker cartoon. I slipped it onto my husband’s dresser, atop stacks of clean laundry that I had washed, dried, folded, sorted, and placed there a few days before.

I can’t reprint the cartoon here without getting a bunch of permissions, but close your eyes and I’ll describe it to you.

So the wife, in a nice ensemble of dress and jewelry, stands in the foreground adjusting doo-dads on a little side table by the front door. Behind her in the center of the drawing is a sofa, on which is her purse. At the top of the frame, the husband has entered the room adjusting his tie. He says, “I’m ready to go whenever you’re finished fussing with tablescapes.”

My husband glanced at it and shrugged; it didn’t do anything for him. “I guess it’s the word tablescapes,” he offered. “The guy invented a new word.” He’s usually a lot quicker than I am, so this lack of insight amazed me. I suddenly realized it was one of those Venus-Mars things where women and men understand things in totally different ways. So I decided to do a “scientific” survey, scanning it to my family. I folded the page in half to expose just the cartoon and some partial columns of text, and sent it off.

My daughter understood it immediately, even though she’s only been married a year and a half. Her husband didn’t. But the survey quickly disintegrated from there. My sister emailed me back, “Can't wait to read -- can you resend with the bottom section showing -- it's folded over,” to which I responded, “Just the cartoon, not the article. Don't go blond on me!” and she shot back, “Oh. Oops. I've been so busy today I didn't even read the cartoon. I went blond many moons ago!” When we settled that matter, she understood the cartoon, but by this time it was a bit anticlimactic.

Likewise my folks. My dad does most of their computer communication because Mom doesn’t like to be online. When he read the email, though, he called her over. “Marge, you do this one,” he demanded. I received the following email in return. Keep in mind that she’s a fabulous letter-writer, but typing is not her thing.

“I think (and Dad says, "whatever you say!) and it happens a lot here — I’m ready but Daddy is reading, just to wait patiently for me so I’m not rushing him because he’s reading!!! Not all that funny but that's my solution. M and D”
In other words, Dad didn’t get it and passed it to Mom, who found it too annoyingly true to be humorous.

My son is very thoughtful, insightful and caring towards the women in his life. I thought, if any male would get it, he would. When I read his response, I could tell he was trying very hard to figure it out, but knew he came up short: “I'm not sure I fully get it...Man is annoyed he has to wait for wife while she adjusts one of several over-decorated surfaces in the living room, which he refers to, slightly unusually, as "tablescapes." Are you guys sensing some ambiguity in whether she is cleaning up, perhaps after husband, rather than just re-arranging? Her delicate hold on the mini-jar makes me think the latter...What am I missing?”

I asked him to have his girlfriend explain it to him. But she said, “It's about the man making fun of his wife for rearranging stuff on a little table that is not urgent or important but she's doing it anyway even though they gotta go somewhere. It's mostly making fun of women, right?”

So I guess my Venus-Mars experiment was a failure. But at least now I know my son isn’t living with his girlfriend, or surely she would have gotten the joke.

 

Karen Telleen-Lawton, CFP®, is the principal of Decisive Path Fee-Only Financial Advisory
(www.DecisivePath.com) as well as an environmental and economics author and writer (www.CanyonVoices.com). She can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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