“Have you figured out what’s causin’ them babies yet?”
By Tom Quiner
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWIz_AfWW4s]
My friend, John, is the proud daddy of eleven children. He is also a proud Catholic. As his bounty grew, he heard the question above with increasing frequency. Here is what he told me about how he handled the question:
The best comeback line I ever found to defend the fact that we had 11 children came from the movie “Roxanne.” Steve Martin plays a bright, intelligent man who is cursed with an abnormally long, Pinnochio-like nose. Naturally, this has always made him the butt of jokes and bullying his entire life. However, he has developed a great sense of humor and sarcasm as a “defense mechanism.” In the pertinent scene, Martin walks into a bar to get a drink. After a few minutes of awkward silence in the room, finally one local wisenheimer blurts out the predictable rude remark about his nose. Steve Martin gets up from his seat at the bar and launches into a series of self-deprecating one-liners. The “crown jewel” of the monologue for me was his rationale for why he had such a long nose: “The Lord gave…and He just kept on giving!” So, whenever we had a new baby and someone would say the classic line, “Have you figured out what’s causing them yet?” I had my perfect answer in Martin’s line.
Take five minutes and watch the great Steve Martin in action above. Life is better when we laugh. It’s even better when we laugh out loud!