Four inside jokes with punchlines from family stories

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are inside jokes where you must have heard a family story before the punchline will make any sense. On July 9, 2025 I gave a speech titled Four inside jokes from my family stories at the Pioneer Toastmasters club meeting. It was for a Level 1 project in the Engaging Humor path on Writing a Speech with Purpose.

 

The first story is about eight decades old. My mother was the youngest of five sisters. One of her older sisters held a dinner party soon after she had married. She baked a pound cake for dessert using a recipe which she never had tried before. When she cut the second slice from the loaf at the table, one of the guests exclaimed:

 

“Wow, you even filled that cake with custard!”

 

But she hadn’t – it was just cake batter. The middle of the cake still was quite raw. She had to put it back into the oven for another fifteen minutes to finish cooking. Perhaps she had forgotten to preheat the oven first. 

 

My mother told us a story about two of her younger cousins back in the city of Cincinnati. The older one, Gil, was in the fourth grade. That day his school class had been on a field trip to a meat packing plant – which is a polite euphemism for a slaughterhouse. They were eating fried chicken for dinner when Gil inquired:

 

“How was this chicken killed?”  

 

His younger brother Phil was in the second grade.  He never had considered where the food on his plate came from. Phil pushed his plate away and asked in disgust:

 

“Is this a DEAD chicken?

 

I don’t know if Phil became a vegetarian right then and for how long. In our family that question is used to describe situations where you’re appalled when you find how things actually work. On April 22, 2020 I blogged about Is this a dead chicken? (Punchline from a family story).  

 

And on March 1, 2013 I blogged about a couple other stories in a post titled Does your speaking voice sound like a little girl? The second involved Bea Kahles, who was tone deaf.  One rainy April day, her half-dozen kids were playing in the basement family room. They were marching around in a circle, pretending that they were riding carved wooden horses on a Merry-Go Round. She was providing the calliope music by scat singing. Finally the youngest daughter could no longer stand it, and she piped up:

“Mommy, please stop singing. You’re making my horse sick!”

The pound cake image came from Wikimedia Commons.