Mom:  See that little box up in the right hand corner?  The one that is red and has an “X” in it?  Just go on ahead and click that one and maybe come back tomorrow.


After seven years of practice, I feel like I’m getting the hang of this parenting thing.  I’m pretty good with babies, I’m not at my best during the 10 months – 3 years era, but from 4 on up I feel like I’m on top of my game most of the time.    So it’s not often that I’m faced with a major parenting dilemma. 

Here is it:

Last night we went to see the movie The Hangover starring Bradley Cooper, Andy from The Office, Heather Graham’s right breast, and some other really funny people.  In it, there’s a scene in which a decidedly effeminate wee Chinese man says, as his car window is rolling up, “Tootaloo Motherfuckers.”  Except that doesn’t really capture it.  He says it falsetto, and he drags out the “fuckers” part of “Motherfuckers” and kind of ululates it.  “Ululates” might not be a verb, but still…that’s what he does.  So you’ve got this ultra femmy tiny Chinese guy squealing “toootaloooooo Mother fuuckerererererererers.”  And it is hysterical. 




My son, who is seven, has a gift for mimicry.  He also has a very dry, very quirky sense of humor.  I’m often surprised by how he knows how to get a laugh of adults.  Anyway.  He has this uncle…Uncle Booger let’s call him (because Uncle Booger thought it would be funny if my firstborn’s first word was “booger” so he just repeated that word over and over and over to him when he was a baby…Wait until he has kids and we introduce them to Aunt Snatch and his cousins Douchebag and Farthead)…Uncle Booger has a sense of humor much like mine, which is to say wildly inappropriate and politically incorrect.  As we drove out of the parking lot from seeing the movie last night, still clutching our bellies and wiping away our tears of laughter, it dawned TWGH and me we could create a spectacular family memory moment if the kid, upon our departure, sticks his head out of the car window and says, “Toootaloooooo Mother fuckererererererers.”  Uncle Booger would love this. 

So yeah.  On the bad parent spectrum, how bad a parent would I be if I teach my kid to say “Tootalooo Motherfuckers” in heavy Chinese-accented falsetto”?  I would make him promise to never repeat it again.  YEAH RIGHT. 

I know.  I can’t do it.   But I really want to.

If you’re stil here reading first of all, congratulations and thanks.  I doubt I would have if I were you.  Second, if you don’t see why this is funny, go see The Hangover.  Hell.  Go see the movie anyway because I cannot remember ever having seen anything that made me laugh so much for so long.  Not ONE SINGLE joke, prank, trick, line, gimmick, frame in this movie made me think that they’d misstepped and fallen flat.  Everything worked.  And it just got more and more twisted and insane as the movie went along.  The story is a snowball rolling down a hill, gaining speed and size and momentum and then the movie’s over, and you’re sitting in the theater, and you’ve forgotten about your $27 soda and your stomach hurts and your face is cramping up and everybody else in the theater is still in their seats howling and trying to pull themselves together and THEN THERE IS MORE and it’s even more unbelievably off-the-chain ridiculously wrong and funny at the same time and in so many ways that you doubt you’ll make it to the exit (located at the front and rear of the theater).