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to dinner, I always order the same thing just to please my father. Meanwhile my wife's like a retard. She starts nudging me with her elbow. "I don't know what to order. Help me." My wife goes into a panic because if she doesn't order properly my father starts to get all agitated.
    When I graduated college, my father came to the commencement ceremonies and then he yelled at me all the way home.
    "WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NOW, YOU IDIOT?"
    "But Dad, I graduated magna cum laude."
    "SHUT UP! I PAID TWENTY GRAND FOR THAT DEGREE. I NEVER WENT TO COLLEGE."
    People always thought I was kidding or exaggerating when I talked about the way my father yelled. But then we found some evidence. I unearthed some old tapes that my father neglected to throw out and I brought them in to Scott the Engineer. The next day he came into my office.
    "You don't know what's on these tapes," he marveled. Apparently they were tapes made of the Stern family at my father's recording studio when I was seven years old. Once a year, my parents would march me and my sister and my cousins to the studio and he would record us singing and fooling around. Except he didn't like it when we fooled around. In two seconds, my father would lose his patience and start screaming like a banshee. And now I had the tapes to prove it.
    These sessions were supposed to be fun, but I dreaded them. Who wanted to be humiliated in front of his sister and cousins? My father would "interview" us and ask us questions about current events and stuff and I would sweat bullets because if I said one wrong word, that was it. My sister would just breeze through the questions, because he'd never yell at her. But just listen to this sample exchange:
    BEN STERN: Do you feel the United States should remain as a member of the United Nations?
    HOWARD: Yes, I really do.
    BEN STERN: Are there any special reasons why you feel they should?
    HOWARD: There should be peace in all the countries and we wouldn't have any war because we don't want the Japs anymore haa-haa-haa-haa. [I imitated the sound of a machine gun.]
    BEN STERN: I TOLD YOU NOT TO BE STUPID, YOU MORON!
    See? See? Right away with the "moron" stuff. I was just doing some shtick, some humor, and my old man freaks. And being called a moron to me was real. I thought I was a moron. At seven years of age, you'd think he'd cut me some slack. But no, it was "SHUT UP! SIT DOWN!"
    We played these tapes on the air and my father called in and said he felt like Nixon. We get along great now as adults, but believe me, at the time, he turned me into a basket case with all the yelling. The day after we played the tapes on the air, a neighbor of my father's came over to him and said, "Hey, Ben, how do I get my kids into that Ben Stern Day-Care Center? They're out of line." One of our classic bits was about to be born.
    
    THE BEN STERN DAY-CARE CENTER
    A child's world is a fragile one . . . and that's why you need the Ben Stern Day-Care Center.
    If you want to turn your child into an overachieving, self-hating megalomaniac who spends his days hiding from his family and his nights masturbating, then the Ben Stern Day-Care Center will work for you....
    Our Motto
    SHUT UP! SIT DOWN!
    SHUT UP! SIT DOWN!
    SHUT UP! SIT DOWN!
    
    Our Founder Ben Stern
    My father was definitely the disciplinarian, but during the day, when he was at work, my mother was in charge of giving me a smack
    if I got out of line. So one day she complained to him that her hand was hurting from smacking me. He told her to get a stick and hit me. So she got one of those half-wooden, half-wire coat hangers from the dry cleaners and she detached the wire part. My father came home from work and my mother told him that this wasn't good either because I held her arm so she couldn't hit me. So my father called me over for a little talk.
    "Howard, your mother tells me you're not letting her discipline you," he said.
    "Who in their right mind is gonna just stand there and let someone whack