My theory is that muffins are inherently high in comedic value.

Consider my favorite joke:

Two muffins are baking together in an oven. The first muffin says, “Man, it’s hot in here.” The second muffin screams, “OMIGOD A TALKING MUFFIN!!”

This is GOLD, people.

Perpend: the joke requires you to accept the possibility of a talking muffin. Then it retracts that assumption and reminds you that a talking muffin would be absurd and terrifying, an opinion shared by a second talking muffin whose existence cannot even be conceived of without the possibility of a talking muffin. It’s the Mobius strip of muffin jokes.

Shut up. It’s funny. Yes, even after I explain it like that. If a joke can’t stand up to a good pedantic analysis, it’s hardly a joke worth the name.

My sister and I once had a brutal, screaming fight in a hotel room in Austin. In a moment of abysmal snideness, I sneered, “Oh, poor you. Here, have a muffin,” and held out a paper bag containing one large chocolate muffin, retrieved from Captain Quackenbush the night before. If you’re familiar with Quack’s, you understand when I say this was a behemoth with some heft to it. My sister (quite correctly, in retrospect) grabbed the bag, cried, “Fuck you!” and slung it at my chest. It whacked my sternum with a thud and plunked to the floor. I blinked and said, “Did you just throw a muffin at me?” Sensing her tactical error, she went on to scream about a few issues more relevant than airborne baked goods, like, say, our entire childhood. But all the time she did, I was standing there thinking, my sister threw a muffin at me. It was so ludicrous.

We are now on excellent terms, but I continue to work into the conversation with all new mutual acquaintances that she once threw a muffin at me. What if it had been a fruit tart? A biscuit? Not as funny. Now, donuts are sort of funny, but I’ve never met a donut that could pack the wallop of a flung muffin, comedically or physically.

Today is my first official day of unemployment. I finally cleared out my classroom yesterday–not thoroughly, not nicely, but as well as I could given the ADHD and the bad knees. So today is Day 1. Of something. I woke up at 4:45, piddled until it was clear I wasn’t going back to sleep, and finally decided to use the last two senescent bananas to make the muffins my son likes. I made twelve plain, the way he likes them, and six with walnuts and chocolate chips, the way I like them (what five-year-old doesn’t like chocolate chips? Whatever). He wandered out around 6:30 and gave me a delicious, cuddly hug that made me so glad to be home, to be free, to be his mommy.

“Hey,” I said, “Once they’re cool enough, how would you like a muffin?” I felt like June Cleaver, fondly ruffling the hair of the Beav with one hand, waving a mixing spoon in the other like a magic wand.

“No, thank you,” he said. “Where’s the remote?”

So I threw a muffin at him.