Author Archives: Amanda Suarez

Knock Knocks and Armless Timmy

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/03/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: Why did Timmy fall off the swing?

Collector: Why?

Informant: Because he had no arms.

Collector: Oh and then the “Knock knock. Who’s there? Not Timmy!”

Informant: Yeah! Also, say “knock knock.”

Collector: Knock knock.

Informant: Who’s there?

Collector: Who? Oh wait, what? Oh!

Informant: Yeah! That one’s just awkward.

Collector’s Notes: In class, we learned about the growing popularity of anti-jokes, and I think is probably the most common one I’ve heard.  It was cool how the Informant and I were able to add to the joke together and make it a two-sided joke.  It’s interesting that this particular joke, always a swing and always Timmy, is also almost always followed up with the knock-knock anti-joke.  It’s like it’s two-parted.  A young child with no arms is not funny at all, but I think it is a way that we address serious things with humor.  The fact that someone without arms can’t do all of the everyday things that we do is really sad and hard for some people to talk about without it becoming awkward.  This jokes eases some of that tension.

A type of riddle we talked about in class was the “catch” riddle, in which you trick someone into saying the wrong thing.  Most times, it’s supposed to insinuate something inappropriate.  An example that I know off-hand is “What’s brown and sticky?” which makes it seem like the person is supposed to say “Poop,” when actually, the answer is “a stick.”  The Informant’s second joke reminded me of that.  It tricks the person being told to joke into saying something that they’re not supposed to say, therefore putting them in the awkward position of suddenly becoming the joke-teller instead of receiver.

 

Dancing Through Life

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/03/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: My senior year on the dance team I was on, we had eight or nine of us seniors. And on the last day of class we all sat in a circle and would, like, go around to each senior and everyone else would say their first impression of that senior, and how it either stayed the same or changed.

Collector: Oh that’s neat!

Collector’s Notes: Because these seniors were at a liminal point in their lives, it’s natural that they would want to reflect on the past and see the journey from the past to the present.  This is a way that they could do that.  In western culture, and folklore in general, what is perceived is very important.  I would imagine that most people’s opinions of the seniors changed, because people are always changing and growing, and what people perceive about them changes and grows with them.

 

Senior Pranks in The Cave

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/03/15
Primary Language: English

Collector: Did your high school have any senior traditions?

Informant: Um, we had a tradition where the seniors go to this place called The Cave at the very end of the year. It’s not a real cave, it’s just like this weird room that you have to enter through the janitor’s closet. It’s just like dirt ground and almost halfway under the school building. They just store a bunch of old desks and weird stuff in there. It’s [the tradition] basically allowed by the teachers. Like, they purposely unlock it so that they can go in there. But then you graffiti on, like, the poles in there, but it’s condoned by the school. It’s a legit thing!

Collector: That’s so cool! So, it like collects over time?

Informant: Yeah, it looks neat and colorful. There’s like really old signatures on there and like people started using spray paint. Then my year we decided to use puffy paint. You know, cuz it’ll stay raised up even if people spray paint over it. I think that’s kind of cool.

Collector’s Notes: Senior traditions and pranks are a huge coming-of-age tradition pretty much anywhere you go, I’ve learned as I’ve asked more and more students about them.  The fact that the teachers sanctioned it in this case is particularly interesting to me.  I know at my own high school, teachers hated our senior traditions and we were usually warned against doing anything that was too drastic.  Graffiti has been a cultural art since the 1970s, but its origins go much further back, as far as ancient Egypt with hieroglyphics ( DeNotto).  This has given it infinite variety over the different countries and peoples it’s been a part of.  Graffiti has, for many decades, been a representation of the underlying feelings of the common people.  In the case of this school, it was maybe their way of leaving their mark, and a little piece of them, in the representation of their childhood that they were leaving behind.  This way, the were expressing themselves in two different ways. They literally “marked” the liminal point in their educations and personal lives.

REFERENCES: DeNotto, Michael. “Street Art and Graffiti.” College and Research Library News. American Library Association, 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.

Pooping Nun Ghost

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Diego, CA/New Orleans, LA
Performance Date: 3/31/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: There’s a haunted bathroom stall…

Collector: Oh! Tell me about that!

Informant: So we have the toilets that automatically flush when you walk out of the stall, except this one stall flushes nonstop.

Collector: What?!

 Informant: They always bring in maintenance people to try and find something to fix it, and they can’t find a problem with it. They’ve replaced the monitor, they’ve replaced everything on it and it keeps doing it.

Collector: That’s so weird.

Informant: So, they’ve come up with, like, a legend that—because it’s a Catholic school— that it’s a nun who sits on the stall the whole night and just poops all night.

Collector: Oh my.

Informant: And that was one of the first things I heard about it. I got up to go to the bathroom one night and it just kept flushing and I asked someone about it and that’s what he told me.

Collector’s Notes: I’ve noticed that legends and ghost stories over the years, have been used as a way to explain things that we don’t understand.  In this case, no one could figure out what was going wrong with the toilet repeatedly flushing.  So, they created a ghost culprit.  Of course they couldn’t fix it; an unwordly being was messing with it.  What’s intersting about this particular ghost story, is that I think it’s supposed to be comforting.  For those who would be bothered or afraid of the seemingly “phantom” toilet, there was comedic relief.  The story was about a nun ghost pooping endlessly.  It’s one of the few funny ghost stories that I’ve ever heard.  These guys are in a new place, and out on their own for the first time.  They may be nervous and apprehensive about sharing living quarters with a bunch of guys they don’t know.  This story probably eased a lot of the tension, and gave neighbors something to talk about and bond over.

 

 

 

Break a Leg!

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/03/15
Primary Language: English

Collector: So, you’re involved in theatre and also some film stuff.

Informant: Yes.

Collector: So, are there any tabooistic or initiation things involved in that world?

Friend: Don’t say “Macbeth” in a theatre setting. We call it “The Scottish Play.” Also, you’re not supposed to say “Good luck.” You’re supposed to say, “Break a leg.”

Collector: Oh, yeah I’m familiar with those. Do we know the story behind “Break a leg?”

Informant: In earlier centuries, people would bow. There are a couple of different stories. The way you bow included kneeling one leg and bending down, so you’re literally breaking the line.

Collector: Oh! That makes sense.

Informant: Yeah, and if you had a really good performance, you would bend really far down, so that’s why you really want to, like, “break” the leg.

Friend: And you’re also breaking a line by doing that, in a way. You’re creating a line by straightening the one leg, but you’re breaking the other potential line, a little bit, because you’re bending the knee.

Informant: So it’s like “Give a performance deserving of taking a bow that low.”

Collector’s Notes: Theatre has always been an area of a lot of tradition.  People chant things before performing, they’ll wear certain pairs of tights or shoes, or they’ll ceremoniously give each other gifts on opening night.  So, it doesn’t surprise me that the “Break a leg” saying is deep-rooted in tradition as well.  Although I’ve never heard it called “The Scottish Play” I think that’s really interesting.  I’m assuming that they call it this in a “He Who Will Not Be Named” sort of way.  Because it is a play about Scotland, I’m guessing that they call it this instead of using its actual name.  We see this a lot in studying folklore, because certain things that become “bad luck” are avoided like the plague.  I like this story, though, because it sort of gives a logical explanation to the meaning of the saying.  As if someone “breaking” the line of their leg gives the saying more validation than just being a bad omen.  People naturally like to have logical or scientific explanations for things, instead of saying that something is the way it is “just because that’s how it’s been done.”  An interesting hypothesis, is that maybe people started saying “break a leg,” then because more people started saying this, “good luck,” being heard less and less, was assumed to be bad luck just out of lack of use.