Dad Is Fat

by Jim Gaffigan

I watch the faces of single people in their twenties after I bring up that I have children. I imagine them taking a small step backward as if to avoid contagion, with a look of “Sorry to hear that” on their face. Like I naively volunteered to contract leprosy, forever quarantining myself from the world of having fun by having children.

“I gotta go to the post office, but I’d probably have to put on pants. And they’re only open till five. Looks like I’m going to have to do that next week.”

Failing and laughing at your own shortcomings are the hallmarks of a sane parent.

I am a parent now, and I am still not cool. I also see a lot of former cool kids trying to be cool parents, but it’s not working. Why? Because parenting is not cool. You know what else isn’t cool? Trying to be cool. Sorry, everyone, you’re never going to be Gwen Stefani or David Beckham. Hell, they probably aren’t even considered cool anymore. Cool is subjective. Were that kid’s parents really cool? I bet he didn’t think so. Actually, back then, I only remember one kid ever saying to me that his parents were “cool,” but what he meant was that they smoked pot with him. Even then, I thought his parents were total degenerates.

I don’t have to explain that newborn babies are an enormous amount of work. When we had Marre, it was exhausting … watching Jeannie do it all.

When we heard the Realtor in the hallway with the nice couple, we shooed all the kids into a back room and told them they had to play “the quiet game.” I forgot at the time that a two-year-old does not understand the rules of “the quiet game” or any rules of any game. I clapped a hand over her mouth, and suddenly it became the scene in The Sound of Music where the von Trapp family is hiding in the convent from the German SS.

TV news is like kryptonite to children. The two major shifts in taste from childhood to adulthood are news and mustard. Kids hate the news and mustard. Hell, mustard even has the word turd in

For parents, Disney is kind of a cruel joke. A year later, you ask a five-year-old their favorite part of Disney, and they’ll say, “We went to Disney? I don’t remember. Can we go again?” Sorry, they went out of business.

Now there are adults without children who go to Disney, and they are called weirdos. Very nice people. Absolutely crazy. Even the nerdiest of nerds at Comic-Con think those people are nut jobs. “Hey, I may be wearing a Batman suit, but you’re waiting in line for an autograph from Aladdin? Get some perspective, dude!”

The Black Hills of South Dakota are breathtaking. They are sacred to the Lakota Indians, and out of respect, our government had someone carve four white guys’ faces into one of their mountains. LAKOTA INDIAN: These hills are sacred to us. CARVER: [Chiseling.] Yeah, yeah. I’ll be done in a couple of decades. These guys I’m carving were all about freedom. Especially the two who owned slaves.