Author Archives: Lily Mathison

Chuck Norris Joke Cycle – American

Nationality: Italian /Cape Verdean/Azorean American
Age: 24
Occupation: Warehouse Worker & Equiptment Operator in the Navy Reserves
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 1 April 2011
Primary Language: English

“Chuck Norris’ tears can cure cancer.  Too bad he doesn’t cry.”

“Chuck Norris doesn’t do push ups, he pushes the world down.”

“Chuck Norris doesn’t get wet by the ocean, the ocean gets Chuck Norris.”

The informant is a 24-year-old warehouse worker and Equiptment Operator in the Navy Reserves. He was born and raised in the outskirts of Boston and moved to Los Angeles about a year and a half ago. He attends an Evangelical Christian church and is painter. He completed high school and is figuring out a college program to go to.

The informant detailed where he first heard these jokes: “I remember it was like my first drill [Navy Reserve weekend] at San Diego, and I remember I was paired up with this guy to show me the ropes. And all he did was tell jokes all freaking day thinking he was the coolest guy, I mean all he did was tell jokes. And, so yeah that’s what I heard it from.” The informant said he tells them all the time “because I think they’re funny.” When asked why he said, “I don’t know I guess that’s my kinda sense of humor.” Along with Michael Jackson jokes, these are the informants favorite jokes.

The informant is interested in very American guy types of things – American football, boxing, basketball, wrestling, he works in a warehouse with other guys, he’s in the Navy. I think something about this joke expresses this muscle-power masculine identity that he surrounds himself with. The first can almost been seen as this rejection of an academic or lab-rat lifestyle that some men live. Instead the informant more identifies with work that uses muscle strength rather than the mind. The second – pushing the world down, identifies with this super-human strength that Chuck Norris’ characters seem to have. The last, along with the second, may to point to a certain larger-than-life pride in themselves that this male sub-culture can have at times.

Turkish Proverb

Nationality: Turkish
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Istanbul, Turkey
Performance Date: 27 April 2011
Primary Language: Turkish
Language: English

“Denizden babam ç?ksa yerim.”

“If the sea my father comes out of I will eat.”

“I would eat my own father if he came out of the sea.”

The informant is a 23-year-old from Istanbul, Turkey. I met her when we were working right outside of Rocky Mountain National Park one summer. I heard this proverb first from some mutual Turkish friends that I fell out of touch with. She agreed to help me by translating it and tell me what it means to her over facebook – as she has since moved back to Istanbul.

The informant uses this proverb to mean, “i adore seafood, no matter what i have in my dish, if it includes seafood, i would eat it absolutely!” The first time I heard this proverb I had a few Turkish friends visiting me in Los Angeles. They were living in Colorado at the time and had been for a few months. When I told them I wanted to take them to eat Chinese food (they’d never tried Chinese food before) they told that was fine but they wanted seafood too since they were near the coast again. They said that they didn’t think I understood how much Turks love seafood and used this proverb as evidence.

More than just a love of crustaceans is at play here I think, though. When I was dropping them off at the airport we had some extra time so I drove by the ocean and they were just silent until it was out of view again. Of all the things we saw in Los Angeles, this was the only thing that made them speechless. I think this proverb encapsulates not only Turks love of seafood, but also their love of the sea. The proverb itself almost makes it sound like it’s possible that their father could come out of the sea – they are that close to it.

La Chasse-Galerie – French Canadian Folktale

Nationality: French Canadian
Age: 28
Occupation: Musician & Housewife
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 26 April 2011
Primary Language: French
Language: English, a little German

La Chasse Galerie – Audio

Summary in English: On New Year’s Day, some lumberjacks wanted to see their sweethearts who were about 300 miles away but they had to make a pact with the devil to make their canoe fly through the air. But the lumberjacks couldn’t touch a church steeple or swear while they were flying in the canoe or they would all lose their souls. To be safe the lumberjacks decided not to drink at the party so they could think clearly on the way back. They fly to the party and have a great time. When they are heading back, they realize the navigator has been drinking as he’s steering them very unsteadily. They almost hit a steeple and they almost cursed but they didn’t and they made it home alright.

A 28 year old housewife and musician told me this folktale. She and her husband moved to Los Angeles, CA less than a year ago for her husband to complete his PhD here. They both were born and raised in Quebec, QC.

The informant told me that she gave me a happy ending. After she finished, her husband told me he would have had them curse when they hit the steeple then all fall out of the canoe and die – that was the version he knew best. Both the informant and her husband learned this folktale in school and they mentioned it is the most popular folktale in Quebec. The informant told me she would like to have practiced it beforehand to tell me around the fire. She said that she doesn’t share this story a lot but she would like to tell me the story again in this way. The informant said that she had read it also in a book of folktales from Quebec. She said that she thought this was a very Québécois folktale in that Quebec is very Catholic province. The informant told me that either most or all of the Quebec curse words are religious in nature and so this folktale represents the bad that will befall those who take God’s name in vain by using these curses and also those that mistreat the church itself.

The title of the folktale “La Chasse-Galerie” translates “precisely” to “The Wild Hunt Bewitched”. She said that “La Chasse” means the hunt and Galerie either refers to a Nobleman from France or is related to horses somehow. She said considering the motif of the flying canoe this seems an odd title. She said that one reason for the title might be that in another version of this story a man goes hunting instead of attending Mass one Sunday and he was punished by being forced to hunt in the sky forever and wolves and horses would run after him.

I agree with their analysis of the story. I might also add that I think it’s interesting that they learned this folktale in school – as growing up in Denver, CO I never learned a local folktale in school. It’s an interesting notion, though, that one learns folktales in a book or at school but not around a fire with friends or when parents tuck one in at night. I also thought that it was very telling that the informant wanted to find a canonical version to review before she told me the folktale – only to find that there wasn’t one. She actually emailed me the wikipedia.org version of the tale before I asked her to tell it to me in person and in French. This tells me that the telling of this tale has changed dramatically from the days in Europe where men would wait until late at night to tell folktales. Now this folktale taught as a sort of local history piece in classrooms. This  tale seems to have entered the realm of folklorismus in that it’s taken for its ability to tie people to a local identity but stricken of its traditional spoken context. For exapmple, it seemed odd to the informant that I would want to hear her tell me the tale in its original language – no doubt because I don’t speak any French, but she was far more comfortable emailing me an online version rather than telling me her own.

This story can be found in a collection of Canadian stories by Honoré Beaugrand, published in 1900 available in both English and in French online (see English version citation below).

Beaugrand, Honoré . La Chasse Galerie and other Canadian Stories. Montreal: 1900. eBook. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t8pc30w8n

You’re from Colorado if… Joke cycle

Nationality: Basque American/ Caucasian American
Age: 65
Occupation: Ghost Writer and Editor
Residence: Carefree, AZ
Performance Date: 16 March 2011
Primary Language: English

Email:

winter statistic:
98% OF AMERICANS SCREAM BEFORE GOING IN THE DITCH ON A SLIPPERY ROAD.

THE OTHER 2% ARE FROM COLORADO AND THEY SAY,

“HOLD MY SODA AND WATCH THIS.”

***********************************

Now, you’re from Colorado if………

You eat ice cream in the winter.


It snows 5 inches and you don’t expect school to be cancelled.

You’ll wear flip flops every day of the year, regardless of temperature.

You have no accent at all, but can hear other people’s.

And then you make fun of them.

“Humid” is over 25%.

Your sense of direction is: Toward the mountains and Away from the mountains.

You say “the interstate” and everybody knows which one.

You think that May is a totally normal month for a blizzard.

You buy your flowers to set out on Mother’s day, but try and hold off planting them until just before Father’s day.

You grew up planning your Halloween costumes around your coat.

You know what the Continental Divide is.

You don’t think Coors beer is that big a deal.

You went to Casa Bonita as a kid, AND as an adult.

You’ve gone off-roading in a vehicle that was never intended for such activities.

You always know the elevation of where you are.

You wake up to a beautiful, 80 degree day and you wonder if it’s gonna snow later.

You don’t care that some company renamed it, the Broncos still play at Mile High Stadium!!!
Every movie theater has military and student discounts.

You actually know that ** South Park ** is a real place, not just a dumb show on TV.

You know what a ‘trust fund hippy’ is, and you know its natural habitat is Boulder .

You know you’re talking to a fellow Coloradoan when they call it “Elitches,” not “”Six Flags.”

A bear on your front porch doesn’t bother you.

Your two favorite teams are the Broncos and whoever is beating the crap out of the Raiders.

When people back East tell you they have mountains in their state too, you just laugh.

You go anywhere else on the planet and the air feels “sticky” and you notice the sky is no longer blue.

FORWARD THIS IF YOU LIVE IN OR ARE FROM COLORADO !!!

The informant is a 65-year-old ghost writer and editor who lives in Carefree, Arizona. He lived in Colorado for about 25 years before he moved to Florida 7 years ago then moved to Arizona about two years ago.

The informant told me his brother- or sister-in-law in Iowa sent this email to him.

The informant told me he liked it because

People from Colorado could relate to it. [He liked that it talked about the] regional things Coloradans take for granted. It’s the inside joke thing. People love to share jokes that other people wouldn’t get, and this is one of those.

He told me he, sent it to everyone he knew that either lived in Colorado or had lived in Colorado because he thought “they would get a kick out of it.”

To me, as a fellow Coloradan, this joke certainly was funny, the wording makes it seem like these jokes are the ones that circulate about Coloradans rather than those Coloradans would say about themselves. For one things, the first joke has a clear tell that the “joke teller” in this email is not from Colorado – they had the Coloradan ask the passenger to hold their “soda”. Coloradans make fun of people incessantly when they say “soda” instead of “pop”. Soda to a Coloradan refers to club soda, not Coca Cola. Also, most of these one-liners need an outside reference to make them funny. “Humid” to people in the Midwest and on the East Coast is 90% humidity; 25% is nearly unheard of. And yet to a Coloradan 25% is more humid than normal. Unless one is able to take an outsiders perspective on most of these jokes, they aren’t funny – they’re simply how life is lived. So what. For example, for someone who eats ice cream in the winter all the time, it’s pointless to point it out. I think it is telling as well that the informant, a man who hasn’t lived in Colorado for 7 years, sent it to me, another ex-Coloradan, and initially got it from an Iowan. None of us currently live in Colorado. I don’t think this joke cycle would be as funny to someone who’d spent their whole lives in Colorado. Its humor depends on the transience of populations with people comparing the norms of one place with those of another. In this way, this joke cycle represents the transient nature of Americans as wells as the idiosyncrasies of Coloradans.

“High as a kite” – American

Nationality: American - Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student - Theatre
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 20 April 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Conversational Spanish

“High as a kite”

The informant is a 20-year-old Theatre student at the University of Southern California. She is originally from North Carolina.

She said that it has two meanings, either someone is high on drugs or “really, really euphoric.” The informant wouldn’t use it to describe real people but rather to describe the state of someone she saw on T.V. or a theoretical person. She feels that it would be insulting to use it to describe a real person. She thinks she learned this metaphor from her mother, though she doesn’t really remember. Her mother didn’t apply to drugs though, only to really happy people. She felt she expanded it to apply to drugs as being “high” is slang for the altered state one is in while doing drugs. She said that she thought it was kind of a unique saying as people always look at her funny when she says it.

I personally had heard this metaphor before and I thought that it was a pretty standard idiomatic expression. It interests me that her mother didn’t seem to know the drug reference inherent in the phrase and that she would use it only to refer to extremely elated people. This may reflect a certain lack of exposure to druglore in this particular family or perhaps it is a phrase more commonly used in the Western United States rather than the Eastern. As far as what the metaphor means, I think it’s a pun on “high” in that a kite goes pretty far above ground and “high” can also mean currently under the influence of illicit drugs. The use of “high as a kite” to refer to very happy people, however, is new to me. Kites certainly seem fairly happy when they’re flying around and natural “highs” certainly exist, so I can see how this phrase might be construed as such.

A National Post (Canada) article used the metaphor “High as a Kite” in an article describing a killer who was high on cocaine (Zickefoose A11), showing the use of this metaphor as the informant came to understand its meaning. Rosemary Feitelberg used the metaphor, on the other hand as the title for her article on kiteboarding – a combination of wakeboarding and windsurking, citing use of the term as described by the informant’s mother (Feitelberg 6S).

Feitelberg, Rosemary. “High as a Kite.” WWD 05 Jul 2001. 6S. Academic OneFile – Infotrac. Web. 28 Apr 2011.

Zickefoose, Sherri. ” Accused killer ‘High as a kite’ on Cocaine; Laughed in Prison Van .” National Post (Canada) 19 Nov 2008. A11. Lexis Nexis Academic. Database. 28 Apr 2011.