In reality, nothing, that isn’t my vibe.

But, when messing around with my wife? I’ll tell a simple joke. Then I’ll exaggerate the fuck out of it. Then I’ll do a personalized version of it ala walking dad. Then I’ll wait fifteen or twenty minutes and do it again. And again until she’s almost ready to punch me.

Then I’ll wait a day, and start a normal conversation, go with it and then segue right into the joke again. Then go through the whole cycle until she’s ready to scream. Then stop and say I’m done. Only I’m not, and she knows I’m not after over a decade together. She knows it’s going to come back, and she’s waiting for it, only I’ll wait longer, until she thinks I’ve forgotten and drop it out of nowhere in the middle of something else, sometimes while there’s people around that I know have never heard the joke, and now she’s glaring at me, but trying not to laugh while everyone else is laughing because it’s new to them.

Eventually she accepts the absurdity of it all and gets that it’s all about committing to the bit.

But the reason it works is that she can never tell which joke it’s going to be. It isn’t every joke, every day.

Like, why didn’t the toilet paper cross the road?

Because it was stuck in the crack.

Simple, silly joke. Fucking hilarious though, it’s utter genius joke construction (and I wish I had been the one to create it). But when you start exaggerating the way you tell it, doing the whole “do ya get it?” shtick, then switching over to "it got stuck in the crack Coral! Only with Coral replaced by her name, it starts building into this absurd snowball that grows with every repetition until it’s bigger and more ridiculous than a simple bit like that can do on its own.

It’s shorthand for “I love you enough to look like a jackass for days or weeks just to give you a laugh”, and it’s utterly annoying, it’s groan inducing and sometimes “Jesus fucking Christ, South, how many times are you going to do this?!”. But it always pays off in the end because once the ride is over, and the theater of the absurd plays out, all it takes is starting the joke, and she’s laughing, and happy. That’s because she knows damn good and well I wouldn’t put the effort into it for just anyone. She knows it’s going to build a shared joy in a way just telling a joke can’t.

But it still annoys her during the process, which just makes it funnier.