My friend, Leah, is visiting for the weekend, and when she arrived last night Leta started showing off immediately. Meaning, she started firing off poop jokes. Except, Leta is still unfamiliar with the concept of a joke, so her delivery went something like this: “Hey! Watch this!” And then she’d scream, “POOP!” We laughed only because she wasn’t wearing any pants. That’s rule number one of comedy, right? REMOVE PANTS. If I can see the cleft of your chubby, rubbery butt and all you do is scream, “ANGINA!” I’m going to tell all my friends to see your show.
Throughout dinner Leta pestered us to finish soon — finish in a minute? finish right now? how about right now? — because she wanted to play with Leah, and she’d walk up and whisper in my ear.
“Does her want to play with me?” she’d ask, except she doesn’t know how to whisper so it sounded like this: DOES HER WANT TO PLAY WITH ME? And I’m sitting there wincing in pain from having gone deaf.
Jon kept correcting her, kept encouraging her to replace the HER with a SHE, but Leta ignored him and began to tug on my arm in rhythm to a monotonous chant: “HER. WANTS. TO. PLAY. WITH. ME.” Why, of course, who wouldn’t want to play with a pants-less, droning tater tot obsessed with feces? Sign me up.
“Leta,” Jon said firmly. “It’s ‘SHE wants to play with me.'”
“OKAY!” Leta shot back as she let go of my arm. “I. WANT. TO. PLAY. WITH. SHEEEEEE.”