"Normally, Rape Is Not Very Funny."

My father actually said that once. "Normally, rape is not very funny."

It was Christmas Eve, some time in the mid- to late-'90s, and my brother and I were both home for the holiday. So what did we do after arriving home post-midnight from a lovely Christmas Eve candelight church service? Why, naturally, when we discovered that Jack Frost was on Cinemax, we had to sit down and watch it, right then and there. (This was before TiVo, clearly.) And though my dad kept muttering, "This is the dumbest movie I've ever seen," he ended up keeping us company as well.

Now, I'm hoping it's obvious, but this was not the feel-good, treacle-fest Jack Frost starring Michael Keaton as a dad who learns to love again, or some crap like that, but the B- (or possibly C- or D-) movie horror flick in which a serial killer turns into a mutant snowman, starring... um, no one you've ever heard of.

Except Shannon Elizabeth. Yes, the chick who went on to bare her boobs in American Pie earlier bared her boobs in Jack Frost. And, because she was baring her boobs, and this was a horror movie, and it had been well-established that she was a teenage girl who liked sex - obviously, she had to die. It's a standard horror-movie rule.

But, of course, before killing her, Jack Frost the serial killer snowman wanted to have his way with her. WITH HIS CARROT-STICK NOSE. I cannot put into words what made it so hysterical, but we just could not stop laughing. And through sputters of laughter, my father busted out with, "Normally, rape is not very funny... but if Michaela is laughing, I know it's ok to laugh, too!" Apparently, my feminist cred gives me the right to declare which sexual assault is and is not open for mockery. And this sexual assault clearly was.

So this has become a standard go-to joke for me and the husband, despite the fact that we barely knew each other at the time the incident actually occurred. Even though we quote it all the time, though, we had somehow never informed my father of this fact.

Until last weekend when, contemplating the Color Purple musical, which is arriving in Chicago in the spring, he began dancing around the kitchen, waving his hands and singing a peppy little song with the lyrics, "Heyyyyy!!! Rape me in the fields!!!"