Parenting Tip #1

Evelyn Waugh considered his son James to have no sense of humor. So as a corrective, he required his son to read and recite a joke to him every day. At a loss, his son went out and bought a compendium of popular jokes. Every day James would read a joke aloud to his father while Evelyn was eating lunch, and Evelyn would respond by staring straight ahead and continuing his meal without ever smiling or laughing.

(Paraphrased from Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, by Jim Holt.)