So I says to the guy...

My son Ryan. Smart, athletic, good looking, and only 3 1/2 years old.

I have a second little boy, but he is only 6 months old and not that interesting yet. Oh, sure, he does the occasional rolling over, almost crawling thing, and he smiles whenever he sees me, and he farts and makes Ryan and I laugh on a regular basis, but since he is not talking yet it is difficult to relate to the world how cool he is. To give you an idea of how cool he is, after a brief struggle in which he cried for a while to be picked up, he proceeded to sleep through the night last night, which is pretty much the last major hurdle we have until he decides to get married.

My firstborn, Ryan, is another story. When he was about 2 and learning to talk, I tried to teach him my favorite joke, which goes as follows: "So I says to the guy, that's not even my duck!" Not much of a joke per se, but it always makes me laugh, so I thought it would be cute coming from a little dude. And it would have been, if he could have ever gotten it right. After much trial and error, the best I could get out of him was "So I say to the duck...", or "I want a duck!", or "I was talking to a guy about a duck", or "So I says to the guy, hey, lets play TRAINS!" Basically all epic failures.

Well, it has been a long time since we worked on the delivery of that joke - almost 2 years - and the other evening, after a particularly long day of teaching, we were eating dinner together as a family and we have the following conversation.

"Daddy," says Ryan, "want to hear a joke?"

"Sure," I say. I love when he tells jokes. Most of them suck, but there is something about hearing them from my kid that make them funny.

"Knock, Knock." Great. A knock-knock joke. The lowest form of joke.

"Who's there?" I ask, on cue.

"Boo."

"Boo, who?"

"So I says to the guy, thats not even my duck!"

On the one hand, another epic failure, considering that the punch line is supposed to be "Boo-hoo? Don't cry!". On the other hand, however, he finally got the duck joke right, which is all a father ever wants from his sons.

So as I am laughing hysterically, he starts to laugh. "What's funny Daddy?" he asks.

I gave him a big hug. "You are. That was the best joke I have ever heard."

He still screws it up from time to time, but that is ok. He'll learn.