Take My Joke, Please
Life's funny, then you die
The other day I posted a generalization about the caffeine intake of young people, i.e., anyone younger than me. (P.S. I hate you, no offense.) I joked that back in my day, coffee drinking wasn’t really a thing for teenagers.
Was I speaking for everyone? Of course not, and I didn’t pretend to. (I should probably include a disclaimer on my Instagram that says, “I am not speaking for everyone” but I don’t because I always forget that common sense no longer exists, and that’s my bad.) But boy did everyone I wasn’t speaking for let me know that I was not speaking for them!
According to the comments I received, those singular, exceptional people drank so much coffee in high school that it both explains their aggressive reaction to an Instagram post and makes me wonder how they didn’t stunt their growth—those insane, coffee-obsessed trailblazers!
Besides, I may not have been speaking God’s universal truth as His Appointed Herald of Bygone Caffeine Consumption, but I was right!
I left this footnote off of my pithy comment (because social media has character limits, and, again, my bad for forgetting the lack of common sense thing and not explaining every meaningless joke I spew), but all I really meant was that coffee culture— as we know it today —did not exist when I was a teenager. Starbucks had yet to explode, and you could still walk down the street, or through the mall, or across a college quad without spotting a coffee shop or kiosk everywhere you looked. (Again, I’m old!)
Just consider popular culture. In the 2000s, the hot teenage drama was the (good for one season) The O.C. On that show, there was a coffee shop in the local high school. On the preeminent teen show of my generation, the (good for no seasons but incredible for every stupid one of them) Beverly Hills 90210, if they had coffee, it was at the Peach Pit, but mostly they ate burgers and pie and chatted with their 60-year-old friend Nat. They weren’t walking around with Coolattas and lattes and ice coffees or takeout cups of any kind!
It just wasn’t the same thing. But who cares? (He says after writing a long explanation of said joke.) I was sharing a tweet, not writing for Encyclopedia Britannica! (I’m oooooold!!!!) Get the f—k off me.
But you can’t. None of us can. We can’t stop getting on each other!
I wrote another post in which I generalized about gender roles and the ways men often get outsized credit despite maybe not being so great all the time.
Do I speak from experience? Obviously. Was I impugning the character, talent, and value of every single man on earth? Don’t be silly.
But that doesn’t stop the commenters. They live to be silly, as dead-seriously as possible. Every time I post that one, they rush to defend their men:
“My husband is even better than people think!” Okay. Blink if he’s watching you right now.
“Not my man! He’s better than Jesus!” Congratulations! FYI, Jesus was murdered for being annoying. Good luck!
Here’s the thing about your comments underneath social media posts: nobody cares!
Nobody cares about the ways your specific experience impacts someone’s stupid joke on Twitter or Instagram or Threads or Tiktok. Nobody cares that you are the one person to whom the joke doesn’t apply, or even if you are one of millions. It’s a joke! Sure, not every one of them lands, and the less relatable they are, the less likely it is that they do, but most of the time, at the very least, we can all still tell it’s a joke. (I’ll give you that bit of credit.) In which case you’re just being a humorless scold, and nobody likes a humorless scold!
Especially when it comes to parenting.
As you know, most of my jokes are about parenthood, which means most of the humorless scolds angrily commenting and contradicting my jokes are actually parents themselves. Which means they are probably raising humorless kids. And that sucks. Because that means my kids are going to have to deal with this same nonsense!
The constant need to hop online and contradict and overexplain and one-up everyone who has had a slightly different experience than you is rampant and self-perpetuating, and parents are among the worst offenders. Because they load it with judgment.
They bring their self-righteous “I’m better at this than you” and “you must be doing something wrong because my kids aren’t like this” energy to my idiotic Instagram page and countless others like it, and they bring everyone down. Because most people understand that these pages are primarily intended to provoke a laugh and offer a little solidarity about this hellish task. But instead of solidarity, you bring superiority and condescension and a painful lack of self-awareness. And that’s why nobody likes you.
If there’s one thing we can all agree on (and there isn’t, obviously), it’s that the world is a terrible place. I find that the best way to deal with it is to laugh at and about it as much as possible, and that includes coffee drinking and parenthood and gender roles and generation gaps and just about everything else (except Matt Rife; he’s just not funny).
If you insist on taking it all so seriously, then please stay off my page, or at least stay quiet when you’re there, or else me and my simpatico followers are probably just gonna laugh at you. (For real, some of my most popular posts are just screenshots of me giving people shit for not getting the joke.)
Especially if you actually drink Coolattas. Grow up.
Social Media Round-up
Father’s Day is Almost Here!
That means you have less than two weeks to buy your dad or your husband or your kids or the homeless guy on the street who needs some kindling a copy of Dad Truths!
Last week I shared an excerpt, about that time I dropped my friend’s baby (he’s fine, everybody relax!) and today I’m going to do something different. I’m going to promise you and everyone else who reads it a few things about my book.
Promise #1: It will make you laugh
Promise #2: It will make you realize that if I can handle parenthood, anyone can!
Promise #3: It will make you realize that if I can write a book, anyone can!
Promise #4: It won’t break the bank; seriously, it’s less than 20 bucks, you can do it!
Promise #5: It will make you happy I’m not your dad (or your husband)
Promise #6: It will remind you to schedule that vasectomy.
If nothing else, #6 is an amazing gift, and that comes free with the book!
Plus, when you buy Dad Truths for the dads in your life, you’re not only getting them a gift, you’re getting me one too! And with Amazon Prime (or the magical non-physical Kindle edition) you can wait until pretty much the last minute and still get it in time! Hooray!
FYI, you pretty much always make me laugh. And if I I am ever a downer on your page, you have my express permission to troll me 🤣🤣🤣
I deleted it all, but don’t have a brand I’m trying to uphold for income, so I know it’s a privilege. Substack is almost social media. We’ll see how long I can last here.
People are just ready to fight too easily over dumb shit.