When I was growing up dumb blonde jokes were all the rage. As in “How many dumb blondes does it take to screw in a light bulb.” Looking back, I can’t really remember what it was about them that made blonde people such a fun target, but I have a feeling that what for my grandparents was probably an “Old Farmer” joke, and for my parents was probably a “Polack” joke was, for my generation, a “dumb blonde” joke. In any event, all three of them had the same theme, which was basically “can you believe how dumb these people are?”
One joke I remember in particular was the “green up” one. As a man is showing off his new house to a friend he keeps interrupting his tour to yell “Green up! Green up!” out of every window. Finally, overcome with curiosity, his friend asks him what he is doing. “Ah,” the man replies, “I hired a bunch of (old farmers/Polacks/dumb blondes) to install my new lawn, and I’m just reminding them which side of the sod to plant facing up.”
I thought of this joke the other day as I watched my children try and make grilled cheese sandwiches, and had to keep repeating the words, “Brown up! Brown up!” the whole time.
I thought I had made my instructions fairly specific. Butter the bread. Place the bread butter side down in the pan. Top one piece of bread with cheese. After the bread has browned to your satisfaction, put one piece of bread on top of the other. Brown side up.
My original instructions hadn’t included that last part, but when I saw the monstrosities that they were creating I realized that I had vastly over-estimated their culinary skills. Or maybe just their skills in general. Suddenly all those ridiculous warning labels you see on appliances started to make sense. Oh, I thought. So this is why they added the “Do not use while showering” warning to the blow dryer. Although, at least with the blow dryer you can kind of understand the end result someone was going for—clean, dry hair in record time. With the grilled cheese sandwich debacle it was hard to imagine the thinking behind it, if, in fact, the end result they were looking for was a grilled cheese sandwich.
As I listened to their excuses about how it wasn’t really their fault—after all, they had never made grilled cheese sandwiches before—I started to feel like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. “But you do know that there is such a thing as a sandwich, right? And that in that sandwich the fillings go on the inside.”
There was a time when I would have been convinced that the whole debacle was just a ruse to get me off of the couch to make their grilled cheese sandwiches for them, but lately I’m not so sure. It’s possible that they just might be this incompetent.
It’s possible that they really don’t understand that the shower curtain only works as intended when closed. It’s possible that they really don’t understand that a you have to take the lid off of the tupperware before you put it in the dishwasher (at least if you want it to get clean on the inside). And it is possible that they think that grilled cheese sandwiches were meant to be eaten with fork.
Having talked to other parents about this situation (and others remarkably similar to this one), I kind of have to wonder why the original butt of all of those jokes wasn’t “children” in the first place.
Maybe because there’s nothing funny about being the person who constantly has to play the straight man. Or at least clean out the frying pan later.