• 5 years ago
This is Andy. He’s always had an unusual sense of humor. He also used to have a girlfriend...who didn’t really get that sense of humor. This is the story of how Andy found out about that.

Andy’s girlfriend once invited him to have dinner at her parent’s place. Woah! He’d never met them before, and so he was feeling pretty nervous about it. You can probably understand – meeting the parents is just one of those milestones that you’d always prefer to be some way ahead of you. But it had to happen some day. Things started out nicely when the moment came. Then the thought occurred in naive Andy’s head that he ought to do something funny – it would make a good impression and maybe make her parent’s stop being so serious.

When Andy noticed that they were going to serve baked potatoes, he decided to pretend that he didn’t know what potatoes were. That would surely be hilarious, he thought to himself. It was, in one sense, but at the same time the joke backfired. So when they served up the potatoes, Andy started acting really strange. He managed to express a mix of curiosity and interest on his face in rapid succession. Her parents noticed this and looked confused, but they didn’t say anything. So it was then that Andy began his ridiculous prank.

"This looks very interesting. What is it?"

They stared at him, and then the mother said "It's a baked potato."

"Oh, interesting, a baked...what is it again?"

"A potato."

"A 'potato'. How interesting. Never heard of these, looks pretty good."

Unbelievably, they couldn’t understand that he was just playing the clown. That was the point when Andy started to think that they literally had no sense of humor. He knew it would be a real epic fail if he admitted he was joking, so he decided to act as though he was telling the truth right until the end.

They asked him, with total incredulity, if he’d really never eaten a potato before. He sighed and said yes, not only had he never eaten one, he’d also never even heard of them before.

This went on for a little while. The more Andy insisted, the more they began to think he was trying to fool them. This was when he realized he would have to commit himself 100% to the joke. At one point, her irritated father said: "That’s enough. You're joking. Admit it." And Andy replied: "Sir, before today I had never heard of a potato. I still don't really get what a potato is, other than it’s some kind of food. I don't know what to tell you." Her dad was getting red with anger.

The last straw came when Andy took a bite out of the potato. When he did so, he made an odd, high-pitched noise and said "That tastes really weird!" At that moment, the father started shouting at him, the mother kept saying "What are you doing?" and his girlfriend left the room. Finally, the father hissed at him: "GET. OUT." Andy said that it was irrational to treat him like that just because he’d never heard of a potato before. And then he left with his dignity still intact.

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