Daddy’s Quips

In every family, every high school class, every club membership list, there is a wise guy, someone always ready with a quip that makes others laugh. This person finds a humorous way to poke fun in many social situations that are somewhat awkward. Though irreverent, I am sure much of our humor could even make the Creator smile at our silliness at times.

For example, one of my dad’s second cousins, Edgar Rummel, born in 1899 and a lifelong bachelor, was known to be a quick-witted “quipster” in awkward social situations. He had a comeback for everything or a comment that elicited humor, even though carrying a barb at times for those who had not done their best work. Cousin Edgar was well-known to respond like this when he was asked why he never married: “Well, I’d rather be wantin’ somethin’ I don’t have than havin’ somethin’ I don’t want!” And he hated the architecture foisted onto rural congregations that built new churches in the 1940s and 1950s, saying “If we’d known it would look like that, we could have just as well bought an old gas station and put a deer blind on top!”

My dad could come up with some good ones, too, some of them in German (his first language), and others in English. Occasionally he gave attribution when he could remember where he first heard the comment, if it wasn’t original to him. For example, the late Joe Kuehn, who worked with Dad for the City of La Grange, would tell the rest of the crew when break time was over, “Well, boys, this ain’t buyin’ the baby a new dress!”

But there were some that were Dad’s originals. For example, when my parents and I were in Kenya in summer 1985, we checked into a tourist safari lodge just after sunset near Mt. Kilimanjaro. The couple we were traveling with, good friends of mine, checked into a cabin a row or two behind ours, and when they walked to ours on the way to dinner, Jane suddenly exclaimed that they were going back to their cabin to pack up and move to a different one, one with a view of Mt. Kilimanjaro, like ours had. HAH! It was about 15 minutes or less until total darkness, and we were leaving the following morning long before sunrise, so a view would hardly matter! But move, they did!

The rest of his life, every time someone complained about something that they were disappointed in, Dad would muse later: “It just didn’t have a view of Mt. Kilimanjaro!”

Here are a few more of Dad’s quips that might give you a laugh or two: “His brick wall has too many spaces!” “Her sail is way too big for her boat!” “That guy’s elevator doesn’t stop on all the floors.”

About West Texas: “There ain’t nothin’ out there, but there sure is a lot of it!”

“Every day’s a good day, if you wake up and realize that the day before, they didn’t pat you on the chest with the shovel.”

“Never drink unless you’re alone or with someone.”

These are hard times for stand-up comedians all over the country. The jokes that Bob Hope and Jack Benny could tell in the 1950s and 1960s don’t go over so well (or at all) any more: no more jokes about spouses who nag; no more jokes about some ethnic groups being dumber than others; no more jokes about sexual prowess or gender identity or body weight problems; no more making fun of those who have less education or wealth.

Mostly we tell self-deprecating humor, trying to get a laugh from making fun of our own foibles or mistakes or lapses in memory or judgment. We tell family stories, make fun of our own ancestry or our kids’ comments on family oddities or personalities. One of my nephews, when he was about five, told a good one on me, for example: His dad was driving mom’s Suburban with seven of us aboard on vacation through a beach resort area when my dad saw a “for sale” sign on one of the houses. He remarked that my brother (the nephew’s dad, the driver) ought to buy it, and when my brother said he’d never be able to afford it, Dad suggested he could “take Annette into the deal as your silent partner.” That’s when the my nephew (quiet ‘til then) popped up with this: “But Grandpa, Aunt’ Nette could NEVER be silent!!!”

Truer words were never spoken: I’m still not too successful trying to keep quiet. So I’ll just keep writing . . . Stay cool, dear friends, take a few minutes to recall some funny comments that are part of your own family’s history: I hope it brings a smile or a chuckle that improves your week.