#3 Why doesn’t anyone ever laugh at my banana joke?

Listen to the Banana Joke here

Every single night, when my dad came home from work, the same scenario would get played out.  He would walk into the house covered in dust.  He would take his work clothes off down to his underpants, wash his hands then sit down in those underpants to eat his dinner.  He was too hungry to wait.  I can see him now covered in dust relishing his dinner and taking great delight in his three daughters.  Loving having this family of four adoring women.  After this he would go upstairs to wash.  It wouldn’t be long before he’d start shouting for me to go up.  I knew what it was going to be all about and I didn’t want to go through it again.  The same old rigmarole.  But on he’d shout, ‘Jane!  Jane!  Come here I’ve got something for you!’  I knew he didn’t have diddlysquat for me but you never know this time he might have.  Hmm.  On he went until finally I’d shout back, ‘What?!  No I’m not coming!  Shut up will you!’  ‘No?  Aw come on.  I’ve got something for you honest!’  Since he never gave up, eventually I would give in and haul my weary school-uniformed frame upstairs to his bathroom to see the same thing I saw for years. ‘Here,’ his dusty socks would be rolled up with the toes flopping out to look like a bunch of flowers.  ‘Here,’ he’d say, ‘go and put these in some water.’

And then there is the matter of the banana.  Every time dad picked up a banana from the fruit bowl he’d point it at one of us like Jimmy Cagney with a gun and say, ‘This is no banana!”  We would always fall about laughing.   We lovingly carried the banana tradition into adulthood pointing bananas at people saying, ‘This is no banana.’  Comparing notes one day my sisters and I were amused by the fact that no has ever laughed at us when we did this is no banana.  They just stand there looking at us rather baffled.  Still, we do it anyway.  And we’ve even been known to hand rolled up socks to people requesting they be put in water.