‘Turn on Séamas mode,’ my son said as we were walking home this week. He said this with the same listless mien with which he commands our smart speaker. This is precisely how he sees me in such moments: an inanimate funnel of content, a servile jester he can request at any time.
Thing is, he can. Séamas Mode is what he calls my frequent lapses into performative stupidity for comic effect, usually when we’re out and I feel him getting bored. Daddy might hurry him on the journey home when he’s lagging, but Séamas will forget where we live and insist we try the house keys on every bin we pass. Daddy will scold him to eat his dinner, Séamas will serve a tiny amount of lasagne into an egg cup and insist nothing is amiss for as long as either of us can take it.
As a professional humorist, I’ve honed the skills to wring laughs from you, my adoring readers; you who are surprised and delighted by the gentle charm of my prose, thrilled by my hilarious descriptions. All this is as naught to my son, so I’ve had to develop an entirely different showbiz persona: the rank moron. My daughter is an easier mark. What she lacks in predictability of mood she makes up for in her fondness for comedy basics: poke her in the belly or pick her up and use her like a phone, and she’ll nominate you for the Mark Twain prize.
At six, however, my son is too sophisticated for such trifles. His taste runs to studied and nuanced character work, and Séamas is his favourite. I probably couldn’t make you laugh by earnestly insisting that the correct term for chips is ‘chumblers’, and getting more and more incensed as I’m told it’s not a word. But with my son – it kills.
My own father was not beholden to such tomfoolery. I’ve said before the only joke he ever told me growing up was when he reversed the car one time and said, ‘Ah, this takes me back,’ a joke so classic it still cracks me up now. But broader silliness wasn’t a thing for him, or any of my friends’ dads either. I wonder why that is, considering that every dad my own age spends half their lives with pots on their heads, pretending to eat household objects.
Perhaps some degree of formality has vanished between these generations, or perhaps we’re all so cosmically insecure we need our kids to think we’re hilarious as validation, even when a greater degree of decorum may be advisable.
There is, after all, a limit. At story time last night, I was pretending I’d mixed up the names of sea creatures with those of office furniture. I felt I was really cooking as I pointed to sharks, whales and octopi and pronounced them desks, swivel chairs and fax machines. Then my son placed his hand on mine, like a shepherd’s crook emerging from stage-right to eject a pitiful comic. ‘Turn on Daddy mode,’ he said, with solemnity. That’s showbiz, I guess.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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