How I Made My Dad Laugh Harder Than I Ever Had Before

Anyone who knows me on a personal level knows how much I love to make people laugh. I almost always strive to be funny, like a clown. Funny, like I amuse you.

As a kid growing up in the 80s, no there was no bigger target to make laugh than my family. I could always make my younger brother laugh. My mother probably thought I was a funny kid. This is especially true for my father. he was the toughest one to amuse. As we are close to Father’s Day, I was reminded of this again today.

My dad was an interesting fella during our childhood years. He was a pastor for most of the 70s to early 90s. He had a big, funny, wise-cracking personality a lot of the time. That served him well with his congregations. He was well-liked and quite charismatic. His sermons were well-received and never could be called boring.

He’d joke with our congregation frequently. A few that I found hilarious were:

“Hey, Mike! I prayed for you yesterday, and God said, “WHO?”

“REV, as in Reverand. Rest, Eat, and Visit.”

“Cathy! I’m glad you got to see me. The pleasure was all yours.”

It’s no wonder I ended up being a pretty comical kid and later, adult.

As a pastor and big believer in the bible, he also disciplined us with spankings. He was fair about it. He’d definitely give us at least one warning, usually two. He was a stocky fella and had a LOUD dad voice.

That often came in handy for us, we usually knew how far we could push things. My younger brother by two years and I were best buds about half the time or more. But damn, we could also push each other’s buttons. I probably picked on him a bit more than I should have. But he often had it coming.

He was aggressive, quick to anger, and would take no shit from anyone, especially me. He’s still that way. So my dad had his radar up any time he was home with us. But if we could make him laugh, things were always easier. And I learned to entertain people by joking around from one of the best.

We had moved from Bend, Oregon to Redding, California in November of my 7th grade school year. We had previously lived in Redding, so it was nice to see some of my old friends from first through fourth grade. We went to Bakersfield in fifth grade and Bend for sixth and that earlier part of seventh grade.

As a pastor, my dad moved us often, as new churches opened up. I remember not being able to get a locker for almost a week during this time, and having to carry the textbooks for at least six classes in my stuffed Nike duffel bag, all at once. That was quite heavy and inconvenient.

Over dinner on one of those first days back, I mentioned to my folks about the school having a contest. You could guess the weight of a turkey they had in grams and the student who got the closest would take it home. You weren’t allowed to pick it up and they must have turned the packaging away from where it was displayed, so we couldn’t read the label.

I was pretty interested in trying to give it a go. I was fairly good at math and I knew our family could really use a free turkey. Money was sort of tight for us, growing up. I really wanted to take that bird home for Thanksgiving and hoped I was a good enough guesser.

My mom ran me over to Safeway the next day after she picked me up from school. That morning, she told me to eyeball the turkey the best I could, and then we’d go try to pick the one at the store that looked the most like it. I looked that turkey over at school with a very detailed eye. I hadn’t eyeballed a bird that closely since the last junior high dance. Sorry for the creeper stare, Wendy.

This was in 1987, well before every kid had their own phone to take pictures with. And I wasn’t about to be some weird kid snapping pics with a Polaroid camera in junior high. I didn’t need my awkward self standing out any more than I already did. I wasn’t nearly cool enough to be different.

I picked a turkey out from the grocery store lineup after carefully scanning the potential criminals. I finally identified the suspect, and Mom wrote down the weight in pounds. We came home and after dinner, got to work on how to calculate pounds to grams. One pound is approximately 453 1/2 grams, I learned.

Converting the pounds and ounces to grams wasn’t too hard of a chore, thanks to my mother’s help. I could see my dad casually observing us at the kitchen table doing the math, with a slight smile on his face.

The next day at school, I dropped my carefully formulated guess into the box, written on my entry ballot. The drawing was at the end of the school day. As I recall, they announced the winners over the PA system.

There was one winner for each grade and I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear my name called out as the seventh-grade winner. I was super excited and somewhat surprised. It’s one thing to know the formula to compute the pounds and ounces to grams. It’s another thing to be able to eyeball the turkey on display and try to match that to one in a grocery store, from memory.

I went to the office to pick up my prize after school and quickly realized there was a slight logistical problem. I still didn’t have a locker at this point and was lugging around at least twenty pounds of textbooks and a binder in my duffel bag.

I had switched from a backpack to a duffel bag around junior high and I cursed at myself for making such a tactical error. There was no room for the large turkey to fit into my duffel bag full of books. The only way to transport the prisoner was to cradle him like a football in one arm and lug my heavy duffel bag with my other arm.

This proved difficult, as I was a 120 lb seventh-grader with the muscle tone of Jello and a slight Nintendo pot-belly. I was close to a decade away from being fit enough to comfortably pull off getting all of this to my dad’s car. Well, I’d have to do my best.

My dad was usually the one who would pick us up after school. He’d also drive us to school each morning. We never rode the bus to and from school, he was too over-protective to let us do that. Field trips were the only times I ever rode a school bus, and that was almost always with my Mom being a parent volunteer to go with us.

So here I was, shuffling along with 40lbs dragging me down, a frozen turkey cradled in my right arm, my left arm almost dragging my duffel bag full of school books. As soon as I round the corner and see my dad sitting in the car, I hear him laughing.

Now I’d heard my dad laugh many times. Watching sit-coms on TV. Johnny Carson at night. Once in a while at something we joked about. This was on a whole other level. He was shriek-laughing. And not just for a couple of seconds. He couldn’t stop. His face was red and I could see tears coming down from how hard he was laughing.

His laugh made ME start laughing hysterically. He got out of the car to help me load the free bird and the duffel bag into the backseat, all the time, both of us laughing like hyenas. I’d love to know if anyone saw this happen, kids getting out of school, or neighbors nearby. They must have thought we were nuts.

Since 1987, I’ve made my dad laugh many other times. He’s still here with us in 2022 and when we all get together, there are always laughs aplenty. But I’ve still never seen or heard my dad laugh as hard as The Turkey Incident.

I once asked him why that in particular was so funny. He explained that it was a combination of things. First, my mom and me calculating the formula the night before at the kitchen table. Then, the fact that I didn’t have a locker and could barely drag my bag down the street and carry the bird at the same time. Also, the sheer odds of winning such a contest in a fairly large junior high.

I get all of that, it actually makes sense. He says he’ll never forget that image of me coming toward the car, and I doubt I’ll ever hear him laugh that hard again. That’s a funny memory neither of us will ever forget,