So to ensure that this wouldn't happy to me, we wrote up a small contract of things that I find funny now.
I, Mollie Hartford-Chamberland, do solemnly swear on my hoard of yarn, that I will continue to find hilarious (or at least keep an open mind about) innocuous and semi-offensive jokes involving:
- Pregnancy
- Babies
- Labor
- Infants
- Toddlers
- Diapers
- Baby diseases (like a cold, not cancer)
- Child-bearing
- Child-rearing
- Peanut allergies
- Finding daycares
- Finding preschools
- Comparing babies to puppies
- Comparing babies to plants
- Comparing babies to assorted zoo animals
- Comparing babies to inanimate objects including, but not limited to, balloon animals, footballs, et. al.
- Funny-looking babies
- Ugly babies
- Bald babies
- Fat babies with their adorable sausage legs
- Embarrassing pregnancy symptoms
- Embarrassing post-pregnancy symptoms
- Wetting your pants due to baby
- Nursing
- Boob-leaking
- Getting puked/vomited on by baby
- Getting pooped on by baby
- Watching people almost fall down with, almost drop, or almost injure their baby or themselves is funny as long as baby isn’t hurt. And it isn’t you.
- The dead baby/dead puppy joke
- Nanny cams
- Background checks on babysitters
- Baby-proofing
- Pregnancy brain
- Nesting
- Using a vibrator as a soothing device (not a sex device, pervert!) to put baby to sleep a la “Sex and the City”
- Inappropriate things written on onesies
- Baby clothes, in general
- Complaining about other people “mothering” you
- Hating strangers touching your belly
- Extra fingers and toes
- Babies with mustaches or miscellaneous extra facial hair (Hitler mustaches made of food, whether intentionally or unintentionally, always funny)
- Bristol Palin jokes – all
- “Being Easy”
- No anatomical talk at work
- Not allowed to say “I hate being pregnant”
- Depictions of babies doing age-inappropriate actions (smoking, playing with matches, dressing skankily, etc.)
- Treating one’s children like parcels or groceries
- Mocking fictional orphans (mocking real orphans just makes you a bad person)
Even if I do not laugh at said humor, due to the surge of humor-crushing hormones and potentially serious life-experience that comes with bearing and having a child, I will zestfully support forms of this humor, though the hormones may leech the humor right out of my brain and make me think this isn’t funny at all.
Should I be mortally offended by any of the above, an arbiter will decide whether I hold the right to be offended. If judged that said joke was, indeed, hilarious, I will tell the most offensive joke I can think of as punishment.
Since then, we've also added a few verbal addenda such as videos should not be more than :90 seconds long (preferably :45 seconds) without a really good payoff at the end (first smile or baby actually eats the mushed banana). I'm allowed a "gramma version" of the video, which can be as long as I want, since grammas live for that sort of thing. There was also going to be a limit to the number of photos I can upload in a day, but I'm not sure it was officially declared. Therefore I just pick the best ones to upload to Facebook, and send all of them to Flickr.
I'm happy to say that I don't think I've violated the contract. I only said "this sucks" about being pregnant twice, and I never said I hated it. (I believe this made it possible to live with myself after vomiting on the way to work EVERY SINGLE DAY!!! Vomiting in a flower pot in Times Square and a garbage can at Carnegie Hall HAD to be funny, or else it would just be sad.) I compare my baby to my dog all the time. And when Emily posts obviously offensive things to my Facebook (like little babies made of marzipan), I choose not to look at it. That's allowed.
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