Pandemia, SPAIN—A woman and her husband who tell each other ancient inside jokes to combat daily stresses have found that even after explaining the meaning to their children, the jokes maintain their inexplicable humor.

Sometimes the children even catch on. At any time, one might hear a member of the family say, “that’s a lotta pizza (or laundry, money, homework, groceries to carry, etc), Uncle Al,” echoing a pizza commercial from the early 90s. [Editor’s note: it was recently discovered on YouTube that the original pizza commercial character was Uncle Ed, but that had no effect on this family’s inside joke.]

“Sharing an inside joke reminds my husband and I that we had a life before the kids too,” said Rosalie, speaking to reporters outside her home. “Maybe not that we used to be cool, exactly, because most of the jokes are pretty dumb.”

Inside jokes are proven effective at lightening the mood during a marital spat. Chris and Rosalie are fans of rival university football teams, which they used to fight about and use as insults. After moving to Europe, where no one cares about college sports or American football, the rivalry between the Ducks and Huskies became moot.

In this household, anything moot is, of course, a cow’s opinion, thanks to an episode of Friends the couple has been quoting for almost 20 years.

The children declined to say whether they get tired of hearing their parents say the same things repeatedly. The daughter said they just learned to say the jokes quicker to make their parents laugh harder.

“If our son says a family phrase faster than our daughter, we always say in an old man voice, ‘you gotta be quicker than that…’” Chris said, mimicking an old insurance commercial they quote almost daily.

Truly the jokes in this house never end.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Breaking News".

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