Author Archives: Arielle Sitrick

“I’m Staying Another Week” – How Punchlines Pervade Daily Life

The informant is a 54 year old woman, who has lived in the United States all her life. She was raised by her mother and has no siblings. She attended school through college, and lives in downtown Chicago with her husband. The following is what she described as “folkspeech” from her mother-in-law.

 

Informant: “It’s from a joke. So, whenever, if we were having a disagreement, like your uncle and I, about anything, and you’d ask your Grandma’s opinion about it. Like, “What do you think?” She’d say, “The soup’s not hot, the soup’s not cold, and I’m staying another week.” It was a punchline to a joke about a married couple whose mother-in-law is there visiting and won’t leave so they stage a fight to try and make her leave. She realizes what they’re doing so she says, “the soup’s not hot, the soup’s not cold, and I’m staying another week.” So whenever I would try to get her involved, that’s what she would do. She said that all the time.

 

Interviewer: “Do you know where she heard the joke?”

 

Informant: “Oh, from Grandpa, I’m sure. He had so many jokes, you remember.

 

Interviewer: “Of course. Do you know where he got his jokes?”

 

Informant: “He would hear them and I guess kind of mentally collect them to tell.

 

Thoughts: Initially I was unsure as to whether or not this was folklore. The phrase itself doesn’t seem very “folkloric” in nature; neither does the informant’s in-law’s use of the phrase. However, when I thought about the phrase again, I realized that it is a form of folklore. The phrase itself came from the punch line of a joke—something that people learn from other people—and the informant’s mother-in-law took the punch line into a different context, her daily life. This is a perfect example of how folklore can traverse across different mediums and how it can be applied in different ways.

 

“The Bagel Song” at Camp

The informant is a 20-year old college sophomore at University of Michigan majoring in industrial and systems engineering. She went to sleep-away camp for several years and was excited to share some of her fond memories of it with me. One such memory is “the Bagel Song.”

 

“Bagels, doo doo doo

Bagels, doo doo doo

 

Bagels on Mars, Bagels on Venus

I got bagels in my…..

NOSE!

 

Bagels, doo doo doo

Bagels, doo doo doo

 

Bagels on the pier, bagels on the dock

I got bagels on my….

NOSE!

 

Bagels, doo doo doo

Bagels, doo doo doo

(The next person makes up a stanza similar to the first two, with provocative lyrics that make the listener think of something dirty, but that ends in NOSE”

 

Interviewer: “Where did you learn the Bagel Song?”

Informant: “I remember my counselor one year teaching it to me and a few other campers. We thought it was totally hilarious. When I was a counselor a few years ago, I taught it to my campers too.”

Interviewer: “Where would you guys sing the song?”

Informant: “Oh gosh, all the time. Um, we would sing it when camp songs were song. Like at bonfires and before mealtimes when everyone was together waiting to eat. We would tease the cute male counselors with it too…”

Interviewer: “Did your counselor who taught you the song say where she learned it?”

Informant: “No. We never asked. But I do have a friend who went to an all-boys camp in Wisconsin who told me they had a variation of the song they would sing.

Interviewer: “Do you remember how the variation went?”

Informant: “Hmm. I think it was the same general principle. I think what was different was that the boys said “Bacon” instead of “bagel”? I’m not entirely sure though; it was a long time ago that I talked to my friend about it!”

 

Thoughts:

I see the Bagel song as a humorous song dealing with taboos of sex and sexuality. The song is especially funny because it makes the listener the one with the “dirty mind”, not the singer, as it is the listener who thinks the singer is going to make an obscene reference.

Oring talks about Children’s folklore (I would consider “The Bagel Song” fitting into this category) a good deal in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres. Ideas of childhood have been purified for a long time in American society, and the oppressiveness of the controlled environment in which children reside in can partially explain their dealing with the sexuality taboo, along with other taboos.

Love By Chainmail

Chainmail is a fairly well-known form of folklore, and has been around for a long time. Chain mail letters can be anything from handwritten letters to emails to texts and are typically sent to a group with some sort of either beneficial or warning message attached, as incentive for the person on the receiving end to pass the message along to more people.

An example of such a message is one my roommate shared with me that had passed around our sorority. The message read:

“You have been visited by the ghost of Helen M. Dodge! Pass this on to ten sisters in the next five minutes and she will give you good luck for the rest of the week!”

 

Thoughts:

Chain mails seem to fit into the category of contagious magic and involve belief a great deal. They are contagious in that in order for the receiver to either alleviate any harm that may come, or to ensure any benefit, from having read the letter, he or she must pass it along to X amount of people. The magic of the letter passes along with it and integrates into the daily lives of those who receive it, or it at least claims to do so.

 

Chain mail letters are really interesting in their relation to belief because I would bet that if you asked a large group of people if they believe in the power of chain mail letters to affect their lives in either positive or negative ways, the majority would say no. However, these letters are constantly passed around. They can be fit into the category of superstitious as well as contagious magic—perhaps it is the fear that chain mail letters may in fact have some power, some magic, that drives people to continue passing them along.

This particular chain mail letter doesn’t run the risk of being harmful to the person receiving it in any way, but perhaps the receiving individual may feel that they are to be at a loss if they don’t pass it along.

Or, perhaps chain mail letters get passed around as a way of continuing community. They are a means of reaching out to 5, 10, 15 friends who you haven’t talked to in a while. Or the particular chain mail letter you have received is funny so you want to share it with three of your friends you think would find it hilarious. Chain mail gets a pretty bad rap, yet its continued existence makes me think there is some part of its communicative, outreaching nature that people like.

For another example of chain mail letters, see Dan Squier. The Truth About Chain Letters, 1990, Premier Publishers.

Variation on Popular Music in Elementary School Kids

The informant is a 23-year old Narrative Studies major at USC. He is from Laguna Niguel and attended primary and secondary school there, before attending USC.

 

Informant: “I used to babysit several kids from the local elementary schools by where I live. I remember several of them walking around their houses singing this variation of Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” [a popular pop song] along with variations of other popular songs like it. I mean there were other ones too, like parodies of other songs.,They were always really, like, childish—really PG. Never like Weird Al Yankovic style. So the Taio Cruz one, for example, went like, ‘I walked up to a/the subway guy/ He said Ay yo, don’t forget the mayo.’ I always thought it was really hilarious—these super popular, often inappropriate songs that the kids I babysat would hear and then spin into their own context.”

 

Thoughts:

It is logical that these elementary school students take what they hear around them and integrate it into their own context. To use this specific instance, the boy my informant babysat had heard the song “Dynamite” played and by some means—whether repeating it wrong, repeating it from a friend who had changed the lyrics, changing the lyrics as a sort of game, or by some other means—changed the song to pertain to things he could relate to. This song is a parody; it takes imitates and exaggerates the original, presumably for a comic effect. I’ve been parodying songs since I was in elementary school. Last class we watched clips of parodies and mash ups that have literally influenced revolutions (“Zenga, zenga” comes to mind). The influence of folklore, that often goes overlooked by society’s understanding of the word, is baffling.

“Oh Shenanigah Dah” Song

“Oh, shenanigah dah, let’s play the guitar, go to the bazaar, ha ha ha ha

Oh shenanigah dah, let’s play the guitar, go to the bazaar, ha ha ha ha

Let’s go on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday…

Oh, shenanigah dah…”

 

The informant is a 95-year old woman, who was raised in the Netherlands and then moved to California with her husband and daughter after surviving the Holocaust. She was raised in a upper middle class Jewish family, attended school through her adolescence, but never attended any school past that. She survived the Holocaust hiding in the attic of a gentile woman. The “Shenanigah Dah” song is one she told me she learned from her aunt and one she always sang with me when I would come visit her. The informant sings this song in a playful manner, typically at times of leisure (for instance: during “coffee” a sort-of Dutch ritual everyday around 11 am where family gets together, drinks coffee, eats cookies, and chats.

 

Thoughts:

The nature of this song—a very cheery, up tempo melody, repetitive nature, and simple lyrics—along with the setting in which it is sung, it seems that this song is a reflection of the cyclical nature of time; it gestures to the passing of the days in a cyclical fashion and in its lyrics and melodies, is an invitation of sorts to the listener to join the singer in leisure time.

 

In searching for more information on this song, I found several references to Dutch Grandmother songs; I love the idea that there is a whole genre of songs designated to grandmas (Omas, in Dutch) for singing with grandchildren. While I discovered this sub genre of folk music, I couldn’t find anything online about the song I grew up singing with my Oma. However, what I find really curious about my Oma singing this song is that it is in English, and doesn’t seem very much like a song that is Dutch in origin. When I asked my mom, she could remember my Oma singing it to her as well, but couldn’t think of a Dutch translation or trace wher my Oma might have gotten it.

This seems like a sort of folklore crossover: my Oma practiced the Dutch custom of singing grandmother songs with one of her main songs being an English one.