You can't teach an old Foob new tricks.

[dreadedcandiru2]

As we're going to see in the immediate future, one of Lynn's less-told jokes is the one in which a Patterson compares a family member to a pet. The specific form it takes is Elly telling Mike that the reason Farley doesn't do tricks like Benji or Lassie is that they never really took the time to train him to do so; when she says that one has to train your pets much like you have to train your children, filthy, scruffy, stupid-looking Mike asks her how she can compare him to filthy, scruffy, stupid-looking Farley. This odd little theme is one of the few times wherein Lynn actually got something right; granted, it's purely unintentional but it's clear that most of the reason that the children are slobs is that Elly never really bothered to take the time to show them how to put things away properly; just as she shouted her way into turning Farley into a furry goofola living in fear of being yelled at at random, her impatience, inattention and inability to understand her children led her to think that bellowing and thought-bubbling took the place of actually being a parent. This leads us to the realization that there's another thing that Farley and the kids have in common: had Elly been bothered to train them instead of wallow in self-pity, they could have made something of themselves instead of being horrible failures.