Different world isn't it?
It is. It's a different world
and I'm at peace with the fact
that I don't understand
anything that goes on.
We got all these wimpy kids, now.
They don't have a backbone
like my generation did.
Nah, they're wimpy.
I think you could say—
okay, here's the deal.
I took my grandson to T-ball one year,
and I'm standing behind
the coach and I'm looking
and I don't see a scoreboard,
so I finally tapped the coach.
I said, hey coach, come here.
I don't see a scoreboard
anywhere around here.
He goes, "Oh Mr. Pool,
"we don't have a scoreboard in T-ball."
Why not? It's a baseball game.
"Well, we don't want the
"kids to know they're losing
"because they'll feel
"bad about themselves."
I say, coach, my grandson can count.
He's been in center field for an hour
watching all of these other
kids run around the bases.
I think he knows he's
getting his butt kicked.
(audience laughing)
You know when we started
raising wimpy kids?
I'll tell you exactly when
we started raising wimpy kids
when we started putting
warning labels on toys.
I did not have
warning labels on my toys
because my parents knew
if they did not kill me,
they would make me stronger
(audience laughing)
and I can prove it because
when I was seven years old,
my parents gave me
a wood burning set.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, allow me to explain
over here, young lady.
A wood burning set,
for those you had one,
remember they came with
these blocks of wood.
Had a little picture on it
and an electric pencil that
heated to 1500 degrees.
Yeah. What could go wrong there?
You'd plug it in.
Heat it to 1500 degrees.
You would burn that little
picture into the wood.
You would color it in,
put some varnish on it,
take it over to your
grandmother's house.
She would tell you how nice it was.
You would leave and she
would throw that crap away.
(audience laughing)
I got mine. I go to my room.
I am back five minutes later.
I have third degree burns
on both hands
(audience laughing)
and my initials are
burned in my cat's butt.
(audience laughing)
So I'm standing in front of my
father who is six foot five.
I have tears rolling down my face.
He bends over.
He looks at me
and he says and I quote,
"Well, guess we won't
"do that again will we?"
(audience laughing)
That's how we learned.
We had as, we—
Look, here's the deal, okay?
We survived a little thing
called the slip and slide.
Now that was
the original slip and slide
that was held down by metal spikes.
(audience laughing)
slide over one of
those you young guys,
you will not need a vasectomy
that's all I'm saying.
(audience laughing)
We had a small hill
out behind my house.
Wasn't very big.
I got one.
I was like eight, eight
and a half, nine years old
and I took it out of the box.
I rolled it down the hill.
I drove those six metal
spikes into the ground.
I attached to the hose
went over to the house
to the outlet and
I turned the water on,
so now that my slip and slide
was really slippy and slidey,
I get back about 20, 25 feet
and just as I start my run
toward that slip and slide
it dawned on me at the bottom
of the hill was a chain link fence
(audience laughing)
and I heard my mother say to my dad,
"Aren't you gonna tell him?"
(audience laughing)
And dad looks at her and
goes, "Nope, he'll learn."
(audience laughing)
So I hit that slip and
slide like 90 miles an hour
and for the next 15
minutes, they dug me out
from under that chain link fence
(audience laughing)
and I'm back at the top of the hill.
I have tears rolling down my face.
My father stands in front of me,
bends over, says and I quote,
"Well, guess we won't
"do that again will we?"
(audience laughing)
That's how we learned.
We survived a little thing
called an M-80 Cherry Bomb.
Let me help you young people out.
It was about that big around,
had a short green fuse.
Third world countries use
those in their wars today
(audience laughing)
and you would take it outside,
put it under an
empty can of Del Monte
number eight,
French cut, green beans,
light the fuse, and run for your life,
(audience laughing)
because when that thing went
off, the can went 112 feet
in the air and there was an
eight inch hole in the ground.
(audience laughing)
My mother gave me
those by the bagful
(audience laughing)
and her only instructions
when I went outside,
"Don't forget your matches."
That's it. Don't forget your matches.
We survived the playground.
Now that needs a little explanation.
Have you looked
at a playground lately?
All right, they wimped
out to the playground.
You go to a playground
what do you see?
Well, the monkey bars are
sitting on this rubber padding
because if the kid falls off,
we don't want him to scratch his knee
and you go over to the swing set
and it's sitting on rubber padding
in case the kid falls off,
he won't scratch his knee
and the corner of everything on
that playground is
covered in rubber padding
in case the stupid kid runs into it.
(audience laughing)
We didn't have that growing up.
I grew up in Kentucky.
Middle of summer, 930,000 degrees.
(audience laughing)
Middle of July.
My mother was tired of having
me around the house already.
I got this, "Go to the playground.
"Don't come home till dark."
That was good parenting back then,
(audience laughing)
so I'd go down there and I
climb up on the monkey bars
in the middle of July and they
were hot because they'd been
in that July sun all day long,
but I didn't dare fall off
because for my protection,
they were sitting on a pad of asphalt
(audience laughing)
which is the same stuff that
road out there was made out of
and then you'd go into the
middle of the playground
and this is where you
got religion as a kid.
You'd go to the
middle of the playground
to that big aluminum slide.
Remember that?
And in the middle of where
it did that little bump,
you'd get stuck every time
and you're setting there
and you're doing this scoochy thing,
but you're not going anywhere,
and that is when you found God.
That is when you began to pray
for a fat kid to come
along and knock you loose
(audience laughing)
and you learn
things on a playground.
You know the first thing I learned,
don't get on a teeter-totter
with a fat kid.
(audience laughing)
He will launch you over the fence.