Author Archives: Ryan Lee

Lover’s Leap: Tahoe Edition

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Performance Date: April 2013
Primary Language: English

“Up in Lake Tahoe, there’s a place called Lover’s Leap.  Once there was an old Native American who jumped off it to his death because his girlfriend had left him.  So now they call it Lover’s Leap.”

“Lover’s Leap” is a common nickname for places both in the United States and all over the world.  This particular variation, specified by the informant to be a cliff in Tahoe, has a tragically romantic story that’s often associated with places named Lover’s Leap, though it is more localized by making the Lover who Leaped a Native American (an aspect that’s inconsequential to the story itself, but makes it seem more realistic).  Heights where it is possible to commit suicide by jumping often have pieces of folklore attached describing people who did just that — and the concept of a Lover’s Leap is simply one of the more popular version of those pieces of folklore.

The Whale Joke

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Performance Date: April 2013
Primary Language: English

Audio Performance:

Whale Joke

Transcript:

“So there are two whales sitting in a bar.  One whale turns to the other whale and says “WWWUUUUUOOOOOAH’.  And the other whale turns to him and says, ‘Shut up Bill, you’re drunk.’”

This joke is almost an example of an “anti-joke”, where the punchline is based in pointing out, to humorous effect, the inherent ridiculousness of the joke itself.  In this case, the joke creates a world with anthropomorphized whales — sitting at a bar, no less — but when the first whale speaks with a very real-life-whale sound, the listeners forget that they’re supposed to be human-like.  The second whale’s response, the punchline of the joke, reminds the listeners of the setup of the joke: whales at a bar.

    The performance (listen above) is especially important, because a large part of the funniness of the joke relies on the joke teller to perform something that both sounds like a whale call and like a drunk person’s slurred speech.

Crybaby Bridge

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Primary Language: English

“Every city in the US has a ‘crybaby bridge’, a bridge that’s haunted by a baby that died there.  If you walk across the bridges at night, you can hear the babies crying.”

 

The informant, from Oklahoma, broadens a usually more local belief (and, indeed, he did view it as more a local story, because his town in Oklahoma has a “crybaby bridge”) into a more general one, by stating that every city in the US has a crybaby bridge.  In the information age, it’s easier to find out about other cities that have similar legends, possibly leading to the change in the belief.

The actual belief itself — that you can hear the cries of babies who had died on the bridge whilst driving across it at night — is a general sort of haunting story, made more unique by the fact that its setting is a bridge, a usually open, public place in comparison to the dark, enclosed spaces that usually claimed to be haunted.

Meeting God on the Subway

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Performance Date: April 2013
Primary Language: English

“I had a friend who me about this guy he knew that was once on the New York subway when he had this conversation with this very sketchy looking homeless guy.  The homeless guy went right up to him and said he was God.  But that God meant something different than the way we would perceive it.  So the guy’s intrigued, and while he’s being told all of this, talking to the homeless guy, he keeps asking him questions to see if he’s making it all up, but the homeless guy knows what he’s talking about.  He even knows some like really advanced scientific theories, and is very coherent and intelligent-sounding.

    The homeless guy basically said that there are stages to life on a planet.  The first stage is evolution, developing technology, and it ends with the discovery of nuclear power.  After that, most civilizations destroy themselves.  Some go beyond and colonize space, then the next step is all the individuals in the civilization form back together to form one consciousness, which is then what God is.  So the homeless guy on the subway is really the collective consciousness of a civilization.  So any species can eventually become what we could call a God, though most don’t.  And he claims that after that, the God can gain the ability to create other worlds, but the homeless guy didn’t create this one, he’s just visiting it.”

 

There are many stories about literally meeting God floating around in world cultures, though usually the stories are tied to a religion, like the stories of people meeting Jesus in person.  This story takes the usual religious and philosophical aspects of those stories and turns them into something that would fit better in hard science fiction literature, though keeps some of the more basic tenants of monotheistic religion intact.  It’s a blending of more science and technology-minded ideas and religious ideas, where God is a single consciousness made up of many individuals, created by far advanced technology.  This informant, himself non-religious, did indeed, at least partially, find the story believable, possibly due to the addition of semi-realistic, speculative science-based attributes to the God of the story.

    The story attempts to prove its credibility by using the “friend of a friend” tactic, and tries to brush off any questions the listeners might have by claiming that the Homeless Man/God answered every question posed to him.

 

0 on the SAT

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Primary Language: English

“A guy from the 90s got a 0 on the SAT and got accepted to MIT, because he figured out exactly how many questions to get wrong to get exactly a 0.  Because you get 200 points automatically for signing your name, so he had to get exactly 200 points worth of wrong questions and not answer the rest.  MIT was impressed.”

This is another myth spread around about college applications.  Unlike, though, the urban legends which are meant to be cautionary tales or explanations about the system, such as the legend of the college applicant who claimed his mother was dead on his essays, or the belief in the “Tufts Syndrome”, the urban legend claiming that getting a 0 on the SAT earned admission to MIT is more used a pessimistic statement about college applicants.  The basic message gleaned from the legend is that the college admissions system is strange, hard to explain, and sometimes entirely based on gimmicks.  Of course, this myth is mathematically incorrect; it is impossible to score a 0 on the test, the lowest possible score according to the College Board is 200.