A friend of mine told me the other day that most of my jokes are "Dad jokes" in the sense that they rely on bad puns, pop culture, and familiarity through repetition.

Suddenly my relationship with just about everybody I know began to make a whole lot more sense.

F'rinstance:

You get the idea. I say something stupid for a cheap laugh, it usually gets groans, and then it sticks around in my head and I torture my friends with it until they learn to laugh (which usually just encourages me) or they refuse to take me shopping.

My only real ambition is to embarrass my children when I'm forty or so years old. That I have the ability to make people groan and still want to be around me, I think, is a truly wonderful thing.

I, of course, attribute none of my bad jokes to my actual father, who usually lived about sixty miles away when I was growing up. Instead, I see this as a by-product of being raised by Nick At Nite. Praise cable.