Really Inside Jokes

Someone on these local Springfield internets, I don’t remember who, had a blog post up recently about how cool inside jokes among friends and/or family are. And they are. But I have a certain very limited number of inside jokes I share with…only myself.

See, a prerequisite for an inside joke is that “you had to be there” for it’s inception and sometimes funny things happen and I’m not with anyone to share it, or maybe no one else present at the time also thought it funny, or maybe I don’t hang with anyone anymore who was there.

I bring this up because the title of one of my recent blog posts, Anthrax, I Know Nothing of Anthrax, is a take-off on one of my own personal inside jokes. I use variations of “X, I know nothing of X” all time in my head. Sometimes I use it out loud even when I know no one is going to get the joke.

Here’s the background. It goes all the way back to high school in a class taught by, I’ll call him “Mr. Jones” – wait that was his REAL name, never mind. Mr. Jones, for some reason, was telling us a story about how he tried to return some defective blank cassette tapes to Radio Shack. He said the store clerk was Indian and seemed confused by his request. At some point, the clerk told Mr. Jones “Tapes, I know nothing of tapes”. Mr. Jones even used a bad Indian accent to punch up the dialog.

I don’t remember how the stupid story ended but for some reason the whole “tapes, I know nothing of tapes” thing stuck in my head and has been amusing me for three decades now. The problem, of course, is that no one else gets it. Now at least you all do, even if you weren't there and it’s not funny to you.