Tag Archives: jokes

STEM Majors be like I’m taking a break from mental health for school.

Text: STEM Majors be like I’m taking a break from mental health for school.

Context:

Context of performance: Discord call between myself, informant, and a mutual friend. Mutual friend and I are both STEM majors, and were complaining about how stressed we are. Informant is an art major and cracked the joke during the call.

Informant: It’s like…it’s like a play on, the mental health campaigns right now, y’know? Like people taking a break from like, school and work and stuff for mental health? Like I’m always reading that, that like, people are um taking gap years from school, for like mental health. Y’know that like catchphrase to take a break from school for mental health?

Informant: and just like, none of y’all [our mutual friends who are also all STEM majors] are, like, popping off mentally [translation: doing well mentally].

Personal Thoughts:

This joke was particularly funny in this circumstance for a variety of reasons. First, the person telling the joke was an “outsider looking in” – the informant is an art major mocking the suffering of STEM majors. Second, all three of us in this conversation have the background context to make this joke funny (we are all part of a folk group). This context includes a deep understanding of the rigorous course-load of a STEM major, in addition to knowledge about “our generation” pushing to prioritize mental health over academics.

What makes this joke funny, then, is the irony that STEM students instead prioritize their academic education over their mental health. I would bet that other members of this particular group – STEM students – would also find this joke funny (if not also a bit painful).

Jokes about Meat Substitutes

Text

AL – What do a dildo and tofu have in common? (Pause) They’re both meat substitutes

Context

I like to collect jokes, specifically puns, on various topics so that no matter what situation I am currently in, I can say, “Oh, I know a joke about that!” I have found that most people have a love/hate relationship with puns; they tend to love telling them and hate hearing them. I mostly tell puns to family and friends, and their anger and frustration fuels me. Though my friends groan and sigh every time they hear a pun, they will still send me any good ones that they find. I also find puns on various social media platforms, in books, and on the occasional popsicle stick. Any time that I find or am sent a pun that I like, I write it in a book that I keep specifically for this purpose. My very favorite kinds of puns are the ones that are long and drawn out, ones that are a paragraph, maybe two, and you get to the end and the last line is a clever pun that uses many elements of the story that came before it. My second favorite kinds of puns are the short rude/dirty ones, because in addition to the reaction you get for any other pun, you also get the shock reaction from the vulgarity. I save the more risqué puns for close friends, as I don’t want to offend the delicate sensibilities of people that I don’t know very well.

Analysis

This is perhaps one of the vulgar puns the informant mentioned appreciating for the shock value. The pun begins with putting together very different objects and suggesting there is a similarity. The punchline depends on word play, as most puns do. Tofu is a food substitute for eating meat. And a dildo is a sex toy that substitutes for a penis, for which “meat” is sometimes used as a euphemism. The comparison of a dildo and tofu goes no further than the words “meat substitutes” themselves because the meanings of “meat” are respectively very different. As the informant mentioned, their goal with their puns is not necessarily to get a full-out laugh, but rather an eye-roll or a face-palm. I do not know how the informant collected the joke (online, in person, from a book…but probably not a popsicle stick for this one) but they tell the story to their friends who have a similar sense of humor, as it is an inappropriate joke and could be offensive to people they do not know well enough to know their sense of humor.

Beggars have conditions – Arabic Jokes

Context:

He heard these two jokes when he was a kid in Jordan. There were many little fruit vendors back then, and there were a lot of beggars back then too.

Joke 1:

“A poor man wants to sell fruits on a cart to make some money. So a beggar came to this guy asking for something from his cart for free. The guy looked at him, and gave him a small watermelon. So the beggar said, ‘The smallest one? I thought you were going to give me a bigger one. You know what, you will teach people to not beg from you.’”

Joke 2:

“A beggar goes to a butcher, and asks for a free piece of meat. The butcher goes and cuts a piece for him. The beggar then responds ‘You’re not going to cook it for me?’”

Thoughts:

I found these jokes funny because they switch out the expected expression of gratitude with the opposite: an expression of ingratitude. Because they occupy the space between the expected and unexpected, they get the listeners’ attention, and strike them as funny. Because these jokes sound similar to the English saying “Beggars aren’t choosers,” they could have been used as a build-up to an equivalent saying in Arabic (or just the English saying).

Folk Belief: It’s Good Luck to Kill a Scotsman

Main Piece: 

Informant: “There’s a law in England that in York on Sunday, you’re allowed to kill a Scotsman with a bow and arrow. So- I mean, this was put in place in the 1700s when England was at war with Scotland and it was never repealed, so it still exists. So, apparently, some people think that if you do this— Of course, there are like law kinda hierarchies, so the murder law I think also applies. I mean, it’s apparently supposed to give you luck if you do kill a Scotsman. I mean, I’ve never tried it but…”

Collector: “Is there any like traditions or things that people do on a Sunday to celebrate this law? Besides killing Scotsmen.”

Informant: “Well, you know, I don’t know. I heard, you know, a thing once. This might be one guy. I heard people like treat the Scotsperson as an animal and they left, you know, a bowl of haggis outside as bait. And they would wait in the bushes. I mean, this is England, so…”

Collector: “Do the Scotsmen like this?”

Informant: “I don’t think so. I don’t think they go to York on a Sunday.”

Background:

My informant had not personally partaken in any of the rituals surrounding this law. From the way he presented it, it was up to individual interpretation how to personally engage with this law, hence the singular person hiding in the bushes. No set rituals necessarily exist in any official or widely known capacity. My informant said he understands it as the good luck associated with the killing is what is well known. He also made it clear that these efforts were obviously facetious and the repetition of “it’s good luck to kill a Scotsman in York on Sunday with a bow and arrow” is something of a running joke.

Thoughts:

There are direct ties between this piece of folklore and intercultural tensions. At the time of the laws establishment, there was an active war between England and Scotland. However, in the modern United Kingdoms, there is a different sort of tension. The Scottish Independence Movement is largely championed by Scots and largely blocked by British government. As such, while the two cultures are within the same nation, there is a tension between the Scots’ desire to leave and the relative power that the British have. I think it’s possible that this folklore is a piece of malevolent humor shared between the Brits. It serves primarily to denigrate the Scots as a group but is obviously facetious enough not to be too egregious for public.

Ukrainian WW2 Joke

Informant’s Background:

The informant, in this case, is my father, F, who was a first generation immigrant born to an Ukrainian/Scottish family in Canada in 1950. His family was poor and working class, and he lived in Canada for many years before attending schools in England, and eventually moving back to Canada before moving with my mother to Los Angeles, in the United States, so she could take a job as a university professor. My brother and I were born a few years after.

Context:

My father told me this joke at dinner once. He asked me if I wanted to hear a Ukrainian joke and I said sure.

Performance:

F: “You are a Ukrainian soldier in the trenches, the Germans coming from one side, the Russians from the other. Who do you shoot first?
Answer:  The German.  Business before pleasure.”

Thoughts:

I think this is probably considered an offensive joke. It has a certain historical context, I suppose, but my father never provided any of his own thoughts on the joke, so all I can really do is to provide the joke in it’s original form. I do not think my father learned this joke from his father, I think he probably picked it up somewhere later in life. I tried to search online for traces of this joke, and I was able to find it but with the Ukrainian soldier replaced with a Polish one, so I guess it is re-told in that way and adopted by different cultures with a similar wartime history.