Aaron Rodgers’ weird sense of humor confuses teammates
Rodgers’ sense of humor can baffle the Packers, but ultimately breeds confidence for his team.
Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
The nation knows Aaron Rodgers as one of the NFL's great quarterbacks. In just this season alone, he pulled off Dan Marino's fake spike play in Miami, tossed 25 touchdowns at home without a single interception and carved up the Detroit Lions for the NFC North title on only one leg.
What many don’t know about Rodgers is his unique sense of humor, an often-confusing amalgamation of The Princess Bride references, Google deep dives and alma mater quips, per The Wall Street Journal.
The quarterback, who at 31 is among the elder statesmen on the Green Bay Packers, sometimes has trouble reaching his younger teammates. "He makes jokes that fall on deaf ears," fullback John Kuhn explains. "But that's what happens when you make a lot of jokes." Former teammate Daryn Colledge described Rodgers' jokes as "Algebra 2," an allusion to the fact that many players fail to grasp it.
But math isn’t the school topic that pervades Rodgers’ humor.
Scenes like the following are common in Green Bay. Last week in a team meeting, Rodgers displayed a photo, randomly, of a figure in American history and asked rookie center Corey Linsley to identify him. There was no apparent purpose to this, but Linsley correctly identified John F. Kennedy.
“What’s his middle name?” Rodgers asked.
“I don’t know,” Linsley said. “Frederick?”
Half the room giggled. Half was confused. It was, teammates agree, kind of weird. (Linsley clarified that he is now aware of Kennedy’s middle name, Fitzgerald.)
Rodgers gives a different kind of history lesson by habitually quoting his favorite movie, The Princess Bride.
While the 1987 romantic comedy is widely considered a classic, the allusions are lost on Rodgers’s 20-something teammates. (At 31, Rodgers is older than all but three guys on the team.) His favorite line to blurt out, he said, is from the character Vizzini: “Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons.”
“They probably don’t get the reference, no,” Rodgers said.
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Other jokes are easier to grasp. During midweek meetings, Rodgers awards a "Man of the Week." The sole purpose of this honor appears to be giving Rodgers a reason to display the most unflattering pictures he can find on Google of the recipient. "He spends a lot of time on the Internet, trying to find anything," teammate Andrew Quarless says.
However, the most peculiar of Rodgers' quirks is his penchant for asking opponents about their alma maters during actual games. According to Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker and former Washington Husky Mason Foster, "[Rodgers] just walks up and asks me how Washington is doing. In between plays."
That behavior is not totally unlike that of Indianapolis Colts signal caller Andrew Luck, who compliments opponents on how well they hit him. We may be learning that the weirder the quarterback, the better the results as Rodgers is considered a frontrunner for league MVP.
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