Eavesdropper

For Easter weekend I went to visit my family down in Spring Branch.  Not expecting to get much done in the realm of schoolwork I indulged in quality family time and good eating. Little did I know these things would eventually lead to the perfect eavesdropping situation. My aunt and I were in the kitchen cooking with the screen door to the patio open letting in cool spring air. My uncle, cousin and the neighbor were all having guy talk out on the patio and in just a few moments of quiet/alone in the kitchen I was able to eavesdrop on their conversation.

My findings? Guys are weird.

 The conversation was about 50% guns and airplanes talk and 50% random movie quoting. (You will not survive 5 minutes with my family if you don't have a huge repertoire of random knowledge and witty one-liners to throw out.) This bizarre family dynamic is even more amplified when the women aren't around to mediate (in other words dominate) the conversation or ruin the manly quoting banter with sheer confusion. I'm still not really sure what I eavesdropped on. Jason, the neighbor, went from talking about his golf game (laughing and making self deprecating remarks about his golf abilities) to talking about going to fly a plane this afternoon both randomly strung together making no sense. 

I was not the only one confused by this shift in topic. The rapid shift caught Jason's conversation partners off guard eliciting a chuckle. Laughing was interspersed throughout the conversation flowing from quote to random stories from the week. My cousin is the master of quoting any humorous movie in the last 3 decades and was just on fire, or at least my uncle and Jason thought so, for the few minutes I could hear. 

I don't know that this is a fair representation of what an average conversation is really like. My family considers Spring Branch a little slice of heaven with family, near perfect weather year round and great food. We are all so at ease on the weekends we get to spend together. The neighborhood that they live in is also extremely close-knit (Jason literally just walked through the front door and joined in on our afternoon.) I think these factors led to a very personable and laid back conversation where laughter is mostly expected and doesn't seem out of place, even to an eavesdropper. Other than the fact that guys talk about weird things, like pop-up backpacks and pawn shops they frequent, I wasn't surprised by my findings and the frequency of their laughter.

We have said humor is very contextual and social. My cousin's use of movie quoting made me think about these aspects of humor. Quoting things by nature takes something out of its original context and into a whole new element. Sticking these well-know witticisms into a new light is often funny and I think that this is for 1 of 2 reasons. (1) the quote actually fits into the current situation and the irony just makes you laugh or (2) it just reminds you of it's original context and you laugh thinking back about whatever the quote's source is. 

In my eavesdropping both forms of "quote humor" were exhibited. For the latter, my cousin randomly threw out a completely irrelevant Talladega Nights quote in a brief lull in conversation that led to a 30 second back and forth quote-a-thon with the 3 conversationalists.

Like I said, turns out guys are weird.