Dead Dad Joke

I can’t wait for the zombie apocalypse to happen. Cause then I’ll finally be able to meet my dad. (Pause for laughter).

My father’s absence and the manner of his death have become mythic to me; a joke. A joke I’ve told many times, on stage, to strangers. Big uncomfortable laughs. Many of us comics, performing across small Midwestern stages and bars, have a dead dad joke. Nobody has one like mine.

As I level my crossbow into his eyesocket, I’ll know there is a nerve, and within this nerve, a whole universe, filled with dreams and regrets. Experiences we never had. Baseball games. Shaving. Dance recitals. So many dance recitals.

The audience usually bubbles over at “dance recitals,” because tension has escalated and I act out the dancing with an unexpected competency. There’s a euphony in the rule of three construction here, the repetition of the long A, which I modulate through a defeated breath suggesting hidden pain. One pinch false, one pinch true.

The “experiences we never had” feel specific but aren’t. My father is a void. The reality is I don’t know what I missed by not having him in my life. I was not inclined toward sports or dancing growing up, though the question is if my father was around, would I have been? How different of a person would I be now? And the qualities of myself I do like, would they still be there?

It's okay. I never knew my dad. He died in a very weird way. He was an industrial baker and had to take a VAT OF DOUGH to a THING and push it up to another THING. (Linger to let audience sense what happens).

I do know he skipped town before I was born, generated another family and then abandoned them too. His relatives, cousins and the like, have connected with me online over the years, saying I look exactly like my father. They try to engage with me like the person they knew from their youth. 

When my mother discovered I wrote as a child, she stopped in her tracks. “Your dad wrote songs and stories and poetry.” She was worried that I was like my father. And now, I am the same age he was when he died.

“Weird way” is a weird way to describe death, and it primes the audience to anticipate the surprise. They perhaps expect an extension of the beginning, something so absurd it can’t possibly be true.

The dough got STUCK so he climbed in to make it work. (Let the crowd gasp, string it out slow). Then he fucking Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin-ed that shit.

The audience is never sure what parts of the joke are true and what parts aren’t, which is why I love telling the joke so much.

So now whenever I go to church and they say take this bread, my son… (linger) for it is the body of Christ… (linger) I tear up a little bit. It might be my father… (points up, lingers) but it also might be my father (points down).

“Welp, that’s my dead dad joke,” I say after the punchline. It brings the whole bit to a deflated stop, allowing the audience to catch themselves and sit with what they just heard. Other comics will use the “welp, that’s my ______ joke” structure to punctuate exaggerated bits built on false premises or standard topics. Generally, though, their bits seem less over-the-top, and realer, than mine.

I’ve been approached many times after a show by someone in the audience wanting to know if my father really died the way I said. When I tell them yes, some offer their sympathies (“I’m so sorry for your loss”) not recognizing what I basically said on stage was that my father’s death is as meaningless to me as his life. Others, I can’t tell if they believe me. The bit ends on a groaner, a long walk to a dumb pun, and begins with an aggressively distorted, dark thought, so it perhaps makes sense I'd maintain the fiction post-performance.

The stage is a negotiated space and it can be tricky to understand why you laugh at a bit. Is it the awkward truth couched in performance and exaggeration? Is it unreality, the sense that what you are told is both simultaneously true and false?

The truth (THE TRUTH) is despite the lack of connection I have to the man who I share a face and creative impulse with, I now feel guilty telling the joke. It’s hard to grieve a person you never knew, but the horrifying circumstances of his death, the people that did love him, the unheard songs he wrote, they make me realize he was a person. In the abstract, I am connected more to him than I am with the facts of our biographies. I can understand him as a person who made selfish mistakes and lived a hard life. I can understand him as a creative spirit. But I cannot understand him as my father. The truth (THE TRUTH) is I keep his ghost for revenge, and this petulance will, someday, break.

I’ll think about his life, in all its minutiae, void filled, and consider what I really was doing up there on that stage.