Tag Archives: grandpa

Proverb about Wasting Time

Text: “Don’t watch the mule go blind, load the wagon.”

Context: K is a 21 year old junior at USC. He is from Palmdale, CA and is majoring in Computer Science.

He says he’s never really used this proverb, but that it came to mind when asked if he knew any. He also noted that he remembered it because he found it funny.

This is one his grandpa used to say, and he warned me before telling me that it “wasn’t very cultural” – he seemed to expect that it should be because it came from his grandpa.

Interpretation: When asked what he thought the proverb meant, K simply said “stop wasting time doing stupid things,” to “just do the work.” The implication of the proverb is that you would rather sit and watch a mule go blind rather than do necessary work. Upon further thought, the proverb seems to also mean that you shouldn’t worry about things you cannot control when preparing for something, to just do what you can. It’s also relevant that this proverb was told to him by his grandfather, as it falls into the apparent trend that proverbs are for older people. This one in particular seems like a kind of warning from someone further in life to someone who still has a lot of time – to not waste that time on things that are either meaningless or out of our control and to instead focus on the task at hand.

Wood eye joke

Date: April 24, 2022 

Source and Relationship: Father

Type: Joke

Folklore/Text: Wood Eye Joke: “My dad first told me this joke as a kid, but I definitely tell it better. A boy was involved in a terrible accident that caused him to lose his eye, and since he couldn’t afford a glass replacement, the doctor offered him a wooden eye instead. The school dance was coming up, and after many failed attempts at trying to get a date because of his new look, he decided to go alone to try to cheer himself up. While sitting in the corner during a slow song, he notices another girl sitting alone as well. He gets up and approaches her, saying, “Would you like to dance with me?” The girl is overcome with excitement, replying, “Would I? Would I?” The boy is offended and angry by her insult, retorting back, “Stink breath! Stink breath!” This joke is definitely a crowd favorite. You can switch up the insult at the end, but you would always die laughing every time I told it to you.”

Explanation/Context: After doing lots of research, this joke has actually been told hundreds of times with a multitude of variations dating back to the early 1900s, when it was first published in the joke section of the New York Times. I always find it so interesting when jokes are passed down from generation to generation, like a game of comedic telephone, where the punchline slightly changes with each person you tell it to. When you Google search, “Wooden Eye Joke,” approximately 20,000 results come up. Due to the length of the buildup before the punch line, there is room for variation and changes in circumstances, but the butt of the joke remains the same. This is similar to music as well, where many adaptations of a song may be released over the years, but the chorus, chord progressions, and lyrics tend to remind the same. 

What Happened to Dorothea

Over the past few years, I’ve heard snippets of this friend’s crazy grandpa. Many nights, we’d eat together and share stories of our nutty families, as we both share lineage with what many would call ‘eccentrics’. Self purportedly from a family comprised of 50% white trash and 50% religious explorers, he grew up around a variety of funny saying and stories.

The following was recorded during a group interview with 4 other of our friends in the common area of a 6-person USC Village apartment.

“You’d go, ‘Oh grandpa, blablablablabla’. And then he would kind of like – you know when you were a kid and you’d kind of like ramble a lot? So he would like loose track and then be like, ‘Well you know what happened to Dorothea don’t ya?’. And then you’d be like, ‘what?’. ‘She went to shit and the hogs ate her’. It wasn’t connected at all. It was basically like, ‘Oh, fuck off. I’m not listening.’”

I love this little proverb or parable or whatever it is, because it’s just so frickin’ unique and strange. At first, you think it’s going to be related to ‘the Wizard of Oz’ or at least somebody named Dorothea, but that’s just thrown out the window with a tragic image of graphic violence. And, to top it all off, it’s hilarious. The shear absurdity of it all perfectly captures the care-free nature of an older generation.

Good Old Grandpa

Over the past few years, I’ve heard snippets of this friend’s crazy grandpa. Many nights, we’d eat together and share stories of our nutty families, as we both share lineage with what many would call ‘eccentrics’. Self purportedly from a family comprised of 50% white trash and 50% religious explorers, he grew up around a variety of funny saying and stories.

The following was recorded during a group interview with 4 other of our friends in the common area of a 6-person USC Village apartment.

“He had a lot of sayings for like the weather. ‘It’s colder than a witch’s tit’. Or, ‘it’s darker than a snake’s asshole.’ There were a lot of asshole things too. ‘Colder than a well-digger’s ass’. ‘I’d rather have acid poured down the crack of my ass than…’ ‘I’m so hungry I could eat the ass out of a dead gorilla’. ‘You talk like you have a paper hat’. ‘You talk like your ass is made of paper’. ‘Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one fills up first’. ‘Tough titties said the kitty’. He said that one a lot. ‘As useless as tits on a hoe-handle’. ‘Nervous as a whore in church’. ‘Nervous as a pregnant nun’. If something doesn’t go over well, he’d be like, ‘oh, that went over like a turd in a punch bowl’. He also had a lot of superstitions or tics I guess. He’d always get wine with ice in it – my mom’s family is 100% pure white trash. And so, he would order wine with ice in it, and then he would get it, stir it with his pinky, then suck on his finger, and wipe it on the left side of his shirt. Every single time. He’d like dry it off with the corner of his shirt. So all of his shirts had little things sticking off from him pulling on it to dry off his fingers. He’d stir his wine like it was a mixed drink or something.”

These weird little sayings always crack me up. They range from somewhat clever and somewhat useful to totally nonsensical and just plain silly. I especially love the strange ritual my friend’s grandpa performs every time he drinks a glass of wine. He seemed to do things just for the hell of it. What a way to live.

Dirty jokes

“My grandpa, gosh, use to love to tell dirty jokes. He would say,’Want to hear a dirty joke? A white horse fell in the mud. Want to hear a dirtier one? It fell in again!’

My brother and sister and I use to try to come up with other things that were white to fall in the mud. We didn’t understand the dirty joke part because we were too little.”

So about how old were you?

“Like elementary school age. Six or seven.”

So you and your siblings would try and make up your own versions?

“Mhm. But it was just amongst ourselves. It was more to try to make our grandpa laugh right after he would say his joke.”

This was a repeated thing?

“Ya. I think it kind of stopped though. We ran out of white things and then we also realized what a dirty joke really was. We kind of just grew out of it.”

 

Dirty jokes are a popular genre of humor, but this joke is particularly funny because it uses both meanings of the word “dirty.” In doing this my informants grandfather ensured the joke was funny for both himself and his audience: children.