Happy Birthday

Copied from my MySpace blog. Originally posted September 22, 2006.

Today would have been my father's 77th birthday. I've mentioned on here before that he died in March of last year, so this is the second birthday since he died. It's a strange day.

My father is probably my biggest inspiration to get into this comedy thing that I've been playing around with lately. People who didn't know him well would probably not have thought of him as a funny guy, but he was once you got to know him. Between him and my brother Mark, I grew up in a house where there was a lot of comedy happening.

Dad always liked a joke, and was always asking me to tell him a new one. Before my weekly-ish call home (sometimes it would be longer than a week, and sometimes, particularly when he was sick, it was more frequent), I would often go online to find a joke I thought he might like. Some of them were probably a bit too off-colour to be telling your parents, but he always laughed anyhow.

He was in a men's group where each week when they met, different men would speak, and he liked to be able to share a good joke with the group. I suppose that makes him the first stand up comic in the family. So in a way, I'm just following in the old man's footsteps.

So, as my birthday gift to him today, I will share with you one of the jokes that he thought was funny (but that he decided was a bit too much to share with his group). I picked this one because it's about fathers.

A boy from Bountiful, BC comes home and says to his father "Daddy, I met a girl. I'm in love and I'm gonna marry her.

The father says "that's great news, son. Tell me about her."

"Well, she's beautiful, smart, funny. And best of all, she's a virgin!" replies the son.

The father's jaw drops and he says "Woah, son. You can't marry her! If she's not good enough for her own family, she sure isn't good enough for ours!"

Happy Birthday, Dad. We miss you.