Inappropriate Humor?
My Dad and I, and to some extent, my mother, always had a dark sense of humor. Mine probably dives a bit deeper than theirs, or at least more than they let on.
Parents tend to shield their kids from what society deems inappropriate. The line drawn between what is and is not acceptable moves between generations. My father would say that each passing generation’s behavior gets progressively worse. He would undoubtedly point to the amount of skin shown as an example. How much skin one allows to be viewed by the public today is much more tolerant than it was, say, 80 years ago.
Back to humor, sometimes my parents’ guard would be down and they noticed me noticing. Which brings me to today’s episode. A memory. A memory of when technically, I had surpassed that threshold of parent/child relationship to parent/adult-child relationship.
I was still in my teens. I had flown the nest and joined the Army at this point, but was back home visiting. We decided to hit up a local mall. Remember those? In particular, a store called Spencers. Full of wonderful, humorous gag-gifts.
There was this particular item for sale that resembled a small baseball bat that had been labeled a Bed-Snake Beater. The picture on the packaging had some cartoonish characters with the female walloping a guy’s groin that was covered by the blankets with this Bed-Snake Beater. Mom giggled. I snorted. Then she realized I had caught her giggling and we shared that awkward moment of both of us coming to the realization that I wasn’t a kid anymore, and this shit was pretty funny. Then we both looked at my (younger) sister to see if she noticed. I don’t think she did.