Wedding traditions like smashing cake in your wife's face fall into this category, too.
Sometimes it's cute and playful, but we've all seen the videos of grooms crossing the line in an awkward way that makes it clear they took the cake moment as an opportunity to vent a bit of the vitriol clearly simmering under the surface.
A lot of this has fallen out of favor in recent years, or is at least frowned upon by many.
Count Brazilian priest Father Fábio Marinho among them, who recently called off a wedding over this type of joke.
A priest canceled a wedding over a joke written on the groom's shoe.
Father Fábio Marinho, a Catholic priest in the Uberlândia region of Brazil, was recently conducting a wedding as usual, when he noticed a strange commotion going on during the ceremony, and during one of its most sacred parts no less.
Marinho told the "LendaCast" podcast he was giving the blessing to the marriage, and as the bride and groom knelt before him, he heard laughter coming from the assembled congregation.
The groom had pasted 'help me' to the bottom of his shoe, and the priest was not amused.
"They knelt for me to give the blessing, and the church started laughing," Marinho said. "I thought: something's happened."
After surveying the scene, the priest realized the groom had played a "hilarious" little prank for the wedding. On the bottom of his shoe, he'd pasted a message reading "Help me; get me out of here," so that when they knelt to pray, the congregation would see it.
A relatively harmless prank, of course, but the punchline of it all is hacky, dumb, sexist rhetoric from 50 years ago. "Oh no, don't make me marry this woman" is basically the punchline, which is weird. Nobody's forcing you to be there, my guy! "When I saw what was in the groom's shoe, I took it off and got it," Marinho said.
And to say Marinho was not amused is an understatement.
The priest invalidated the marriage on the spot because the groom wasn't taking it seriously.
"I said, 'Look, this is an impediment to me validating your marriage. Therefore, the wedding is canceled,'" Marinho went on to say. He told the groom, "You'll have to go through all the necessary procedures and decide if you really want to marry her."
Marinho very clearly felt slighted; now imagine the man's wife-to-be. "This isn't a joke or theater," he said. "Leave the jokes for the party with your guests. I'm not there to celebrate something that isn't serious."
So he decided to give the groom what he said he wanted: An out. "If the groom is asking for help, he doesn't want it. In the name of the Church, I am obliged, by canon law, to suspend the marriage. The marriage becomes invalid," he explained.