Everybody Get Inside!

This essential piece of life advice is no joke

In this column I am going to reveal the single most effective tool for building deep, long-lasting and meaningful relationships. This is something of a departure for me. I typically don’t use my column to make sweeping pronouncements — partly out of modesty but also because, as any number of friends, commenters and editors have told me over the years, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Still, I’m confident about this one, and I won’t bury the lede anymore. The key to sustaining quality interpersonal relationships is… inside jokes. You know, those tidbits of whimsy that you share with a select group of people — possibly only one other person — that only you can reference and joke about together. Meanwhile, anyone present who’s not in on the joke looks around at everyone else laughing and says, “Wait, what? I don’t get it.”

Inside jokes can come from anywhere — a family member’s odd quirk, an obscure line from a favorite movie, or that hideous jacket worn every day by your high school geometry teacher. Maybe a few years ago you and a friend went out to eat, and the server hilariously mispronounced the name of a variety of cheese, so now whenever the subject of salad comes up, one of you says, “And would you like FEET-A cheese on that?”

Fast Friends

Inside jokes operate like a shared secret that instantly binds people together. Once, during a parent function at my daughter’s school, another dad mentioned that he was the seventh of nine kids. I said, “Hey, like the Seven of Nine character on Star Trek: Voyager!” And now, even ten years later, whenever I see him around town, I can say, “Hey, Seven of Nine!” and enjoy watching the recognition come over his face as he recalls how much he regrets sharing that piece of information with me.

A good inside joke can also have staying power. Just ask my freshman-year college roommate. Soon after moving in together, I noticed from picking up our mail that his name was frequently misspelled. I started to pretend I wasn’t sure myself about the correct spelling and pronunciation of his name. When someone asked for him on the phone, I would hold my hand over the receiver and say, “Wait, what’s your name again?” Hilarious, right? Now imagine how much HE enjoyed hearing it every day for the whole school year! Why he chose to “study abroad” in Antarctica the next semester rather than room with me again, I’ll never know.

Recently, however, I realized that inside jokes can even prove critical in a potential emergency. Specifically, I’m talking about those scam artists who call you demanding money, claiming to have kidnapped a child who can be heard wailing in the background. I saw an online video warning about these calls, recommending that family members memorize a safe word like “pistachio” they can all use to test whether someone’s really been kidnapped. It makes perfect sense, except when I imagine what would happen if my family adopted this strategy, and I later found myself on the phone with the alleged kidnappers trying to remember the “safe” word.

“Hang on, I know this. It’s like, um… a nut of some kind maybe? Or wait, is it an ice cream flavor? Dammit, just give me a minute, would you?”

In desperation, I would wind up shouting out, “I’ve got it – it’s Ja-mocha Almond Fudge!”

Hacking the System

So the safe word plan won’t work for me. But what would work, and you’ve no doubt already figured out where I’m going with this, is an inside joke exclusive to one’s family. So, for example, in my household, we have a running joke about my son’s grade school friend I’ll call “Martin.” My son used to praise Martin’s computer skills to the heavens, frequently describing him as a “master hacker.” It turns out that Martin earned this reputation after telling my son he’d successfully logged into and posted from his older sister’s Facebook account. Not exactly breaking into the Pentagon mainframe, but good enough to impress a fellow 10-year-old. 

As a result, whenever any member of our household encounters a tech-related problem, from difficulty remembering login information to figuring out how to operate a hotel AC unit, our go-to joke is to say we need to call Martin. I’m 100 percent confident that if I ever get that potentially terrifying phone call, I know I can confirm it’s a scam by demanding to have the kidnappers ask any member of my family, “Who is the master hacker?”

And if it turns out that the kidnapping is real, well, when the bewildered kidnappers inevitably turn to each other and ask, “What did he say?” and “Who is the master what?”, my captive child can take advantage of the confusion to make an escape.

The Inside Dope

On rare occasions an inside joke will get out and enter the wider culture for all of us to enjoy and get in on. The best example of this phenomenon is the term “420,” which, like so many of the best inside jokes, originated as a subtle reference to illicit drug use. Credit for coining the term is given to a group of Bay Area high school students in the early 1970s who settled on 4:20 pm as a regular time after school to sneak off to smoke pot. 

Like a group of undercover teenage spies, the students began using “420” to surreptitiously signal to one another when they wanted to get high. The school’s teachers and administrators were undoubtedly at a loss to crack the code as this group of tie-dye-clad students would say “420?” to one another and then later emerge, giggling, from a smoke-filled VW van parked in the school parking lot. 

One of the students later went to work for the Grateful Dead, at which point this once “inside” joke rapidly began embarking on a long, strange trip of its own to become common parlance, not only among the stoner community but in the wider lexicon. So common, in fact, that during a recent meeting at the Vatican when Pope Francis was informed by an aide that an upcoming papal address would be taking place at 4:20 in the afternoon, the pontiff reportedly responded by saying “4:20?” and then raised his eyebrows inquisitively while bringing a pinched right thumb and index finger to his lips.

But the point, and I do have one (I swear – go back and look!), is that inside jokes are great for building relationships, whether with new acquaintances, coworkers, neighbors and possibly even major religious figures. Which reminds me, I should really give my old college roommate a call. If I could only remember his name…