In Chapter 10, why do people laugh when John calls the director "my father" ?in chapter 10 of Brave New World, Linda and John come in the room....

In Huxley's Brave New World's  a
return to Chapter 3 will provide clarification as in this chapter, Mustapha Mond, the
Resident Controller for Europe and one of the ten World Controllers sits down on a bench
beside the Director who speaks to children, who have been cavorting in sexual games.  He
tells the children that the old world did not allow people to take things "easily," it
did not allow them to be "sane, virtuous, happy":

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What with mothers and lovers, what with the
prhibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the tempatations and the lonely
remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the
uncertainties and the poverty--they were forced to feel strongly.  And, feeling
strongly...how could they be
stable?

The word
mother becomes obscene and dirty for these children as it is
associated with pain, fever, groaning,--emotion--old age and poverty. Mond tells
them,

"Our
ancestors were so stupid and shor-sighted that when the first reformers came along and
offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn't have anything to do
with them....

"And home was as squalid psychically as
physically.  Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of
tightly packed life, reeking with emotion.  What suffocating intimacies, what danterou,
insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group!  Maniacally, the
mother brooded over her children...lke a cat over its kittens...Yes, you may well
shudder!"

The idea of parents
is funny in a "scatological" way.  If someone calls another "Father," it is actually
an deprecating joke since the Trobriands conception has done away with natural
childbirth.  Nobody has ever heard of a father or
mother, words whose connotations are humorous in a "bathroom joke"
sort of way, and smutty.  However, there is nothing humorous about old age which is
anathema to the conditioned citizens of the Brave New World. Linda's appearance is
repulsive; she reminds them of the dying people at the hospital.