Joke Decoder (panel 35)

Meet the family!

The te’Brae Family Tree.  Mr. Vert te’Brae and all of his wacky relatives make themselves known.  Many jokes are contained in this cartoon.  You’ll notice that all of the females in the family are in oval frames and the males are in rectangular.  The “limbs” of the tree connecting these frames are, of course, bones.

Allow me to introduce you to the family.  Starting with Vert in the black frame, we see his lovely wife Verta to his right.  They have three children:  Bobby, Sally, and Junior.  All have appeared in at least one other cartoon.  Vert has two brothers:  IntroVert, who unfortunately could not make it to the photo session, and Verté, Vert’s gay brother.  Their parents’ names, are PerVert and Sally Lynn Edwards [initials, SLE, stand for systemic lupus erythmatosus.  Not a good disease to get].  Perv and Sally are no longer married.  Sally ran off and got remarried to Mr. Herrington [named after the scoliosis Harrington rods].  Together they had Scolia (Vert’s “twisted” half-sister),  HemiVert, and Blocked-Vert.  Block shacked up with some other spine and now is stuck with his son Chip (“chip off the old block”).  Moving over to an even stranger side of the family is Vert’s aunt and uncle:  Unco-Vert [named after a joint in the neck] and Aunte-Vert.  They had Vert’s Cousin Pars [part of the lumbar vertebra].  And then there’s the inbreeding that we don’t really talk about, but that’s how Biffi-Da came about [spina bifida is a birth defect in which a vertebra does not form in the center where the spinous process usually is].  Responsible for this whole clan is Grandpa Paget [a bone disease that is seen with old age] and Grandma Opeña [short for osteopena = bone thinning, again seen with old age].  And that my friends is the te’Brae Family!