Category Archives: Stereotypes/Blason Populaire

Trombone Player Joke

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: College student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 04/01/2019
Primary Language: English

Context: The informant, a 20-year-old female college student who was enrolled in ANTH 333 during a prior semester, was eager to participate in my folklore collection. She shared some folklore with me that she has collected throughout her childhood and her time at USC. The following is an excerpt from our conversation, in which the informant shared a joke told to her by her father, a professional musician.

Text:

Informant: My dad is a musician, and he has a lot of musician jokes. Basically he told me that, and I wouldn’t have gotten it, but basically he told me that like trombone players are apparently like the butt of every joke because apparently they’re like useless. So, one of the jokes he um told me is: What’s the difference between a rattlesnake in the desert and a trombone player?

Interviewer: What is the difference between a rattlesnake in the desert and a trombone player?

Informant: The rattlesnake was on his way to a gig.

Interviewer: That’s really funny. So, do musicians say this to trombone players? Is it like a form of hazing?

Informant: It kind of is. I don’t know if my dad tells this to trombone players, but definitely among his musician friends they go back and forth with stupid trombone player jokes. I just had no idea that trombone players were the butt of the music community’s jokes, but apparently they are.

Informant’s relationship to this item: While the informant did not understand the joke initially, once her father explained that trombone players are often teased by other members of the music community, she was able to recognize the humor in her father’s joke. This is not a joke that the informant regularly shares with people who are not members of the music community, nor is it a joke that her father typically shares with trombone players.

Interpretation: The joke shared by the informant definitely qualifies as an inside-joke, or a joke that only a specific community of people would be likely to understand. Not only is the joke specific to the music community, who are the only people who understand that trombone players are regularly made fun of, but it is also not typically performed for trombone players. Additionally, the joke qualifies as a joke riddle, in which the listener is prompted to figure out the correct and humorous response to the posed question based on context clues. Finally, the joke qualifies as blason populaire, a term used to describe any kind of folklore (not just jokes) about a stereotypical identity or group. This specific joke is making fun of the fact that it is typically difficult for trombone players to find paid work.

 

Dumb southerners

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Marietta, Georgia
Performance Date: 4/19/19
Primary Language: English

Main piece: A common stereotype is that people from the Southeast are fat, uneducated, racist rednecks.

Context: The informant (S) is originally from Marietta, Georgia, and their lineage traces back to Germany on both sides of their family. They are a high school student about to graduate and head off to Boston for college. They were raised Christian and consider themselves spiritual, but they do not align themselves with any organized religion. Our conversation took place over FaceTime while S cleaned their room and played Tame Impala in the background. S has heard this stereotype of Southerners their entire life, both from Georgians and non-Georgians alike. Interestingly, S even jokes about this stereotype having some truth to it: “When you go to school in the suburbs of Georgia and see people with confederate flag stickers on their cars, it’s hard not to label those around you as uneducated racists!” In all seriousness, S knows many people (including themself) who actively work hard to not become or buy into this stereotype. They want to prove people wrong and change the overall social climate of Georgia.

Personal thoughts: S and I will both maintain that this stereotype has tidbits of truth to it, but even more so than our personal experiences as Georgians, this conception of Southerners has solid historical basis – a quality that not every stereotype bears. To be obvious… the Civil War, in which the South was fighting to keep slavery alive and well. Some people may vaguely argue that the war was about “states’ rights,” but consider what rights Southern states were fighting to maintain – the right to own slaves. It would be naive to think that those age-old mentalities have simply disappeared, especially when almost every Georgian either knows somebody who owns a Confederate flag or owns one themself. One hundred years after slavery came the tumultuous yet impactful Civil Rights Movement, proving that racism never ended with slavery. Even today, lynchings and hate crimes occur way too often in the Southeast. So, while it is increasingly important for Southerners to educate ourselves on social/political issues, advocate for others and fight back against hate groups that give us a bad name, it is also equally important to recognize that these somewhat hurtful stereotypes derive from truth. Instead of getting defensive about them, we must acknowledge the South’s history of racism and subjugation, and prove with our actions that we are working to remedy that painful history.

The Engineer’s Constant – A Stereotype about Engineers

Nationality: USA
Age: 20
Occupation: University Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 3, 2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Item:

The engineer’s constant is 3.  We don’t need to be accurate so we round e to 3 and pi to 3, and also g is 10.

 

Context:

I collected this piece from a physics lab partner who is also an astronautical engineering major at the University of Southern California.  Some of our calculations were off, so he joked about rounding the final answer to three.  When I asked why, he explained that three is the engineer’s constant.  As such, three would be a good alternate answer if we could not find the error in our calculations.  The informant said that he found the engineer’s constant for the first time on an engineering meme page.

 

Analysis:

This short piece actually reveals a bit about the culture of engineers, including their work habits and particularly stereotypes about them.  I have heard of the stereotype that engineers are not always the most accurate, and that they are quite liberal when rounding or making approximations.  There are also jokes about how engineering students should not be trusted with any technical applications of their studies because of this.  I think the stereotype comes from the fact that engineers often do quick, back of the envelope approximations of things in order to get a sense of what they are working with before they dive into the more detailed computations.  Furthermore, sometimes the exact answer is not as significant as getting the correct order of approximation.  My astronautical engineering professor has actually done this during class multiple times because the exact values of the computations were insignificant.  In most cases, he rounds the gravity constant from 9.8 to 10.  By extension, we round commonly used constants such as Euler’s number and pi to 3 for ease of computation as well.  As such, those outside of engineering may mistake this as what we primarily rely on when we work.  The stereotype is not insulting to engineers though, in fact, engineers themselves have also made jokes about it as seen on engineering meme pages.  The potentially insulting stereotype is countered by fully embracing it and taking pride in it as part of the group identity of engineers.  What this short piece reveals is how stereotypes may emerge about a group from those who are not in it, as well as how taking pride in these opinions can counter them and become a part of your identity as a member of that group.  In this case, the stereotype is about how engineers appear to be very generous in approximation, but engineers embrace this by claiming the engineer’s constant.

Chinese Restaurant Clapping Game

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student/Musician
Residence: Pennsylvania/California
Performance Date: 4/11/19
Primary Language: English

Context

Having collected a fairly common children’s game, thumb wars, I sought a game or rhyme that was more obscure. While familiar with similar games such as Paddy Cake (which the informant mentioned for reference), I had never heard of the Chinese Restaurant variant.

Main Piece

When I was little, on the playground we used to have… it was a sort of “paddy cake”-like game that had, um… a rhyme about a Chinese restaurant. So you would start and you would clap your hands together and clap opposite hands with your partner, and it would be like:

“I went to a Chinese restaurant 

To buy a loaf of bread bread bread

The waiter asked me what I want 

And this is what I said said said”

and then you would point to your eye and say:

“I know karate”

then you would punch and say:

“Punch in the body”

Then you would cover your hands with your mouth and say:

“Oops I’m sorry”

Then you would wag your finger and say:

“Don’t tell my mommy”

And then the most upsetting part is that you would move your eyelids in accordance with people’s race, so you would say:

“Chinese” — pull your eyelids up — or down, I don’t remember

“Japanese” — pull your eyelids up and then you say:

“Freeze!”

And then whoever said “check please!” first would win.

Notes

As the informant notes, the game is upsetting, enforcing the kind of racial stereotypes and prejudices that would have been seen as innocuous in past decades. As such, I would classify it as an example of blason populaire. It is through games and rhymes such as these, shared among children during their formative years, that casual racism insidiously engrains itself into young minds. Thankfully, the informant grew up and now recognizes the problematic nature of this game, but many others likely do not, and maybe even teach it to their children one day.

Arab/Muslim Stereotype

Nationality: Arab
Age: 27
Occupation: Uber Driver
Performance Date: 4-7-18
Primary Language: Arabic

Main Piece: “Every Arab who is a Muslim and is a male is either named Mohamed, Ali, or Yousef” Context:  On April 7, 2018 I called an Uber to go to a party. When the driver arrived I said “Hi, how are you doing today? My name is Jaeson. Nice to meet you”. He replied “ I am doing great. Yousef nice to meet you to. He then said “Yup… another Yousef”.  He then said “Every Arab who is a Muslim and is a male is either named Mohamed, Ali, or Yousef”. I said I am sorry can you repeat that. He said ok and repeated it. I asked him if I could write it down as a collection of folklore and he said yes. Background: Yousef is a 27 year old Uber driver who drives a red Camry. He is Arab and he is also a Muslim.  Analysis: I was intrigued to learn this stereotype about Arabs and Muslim from an Arab. I went to a high school that had a large population of Arabs and there was a large portion with the name Mohamed, Ali, and Yousef. However, it is not true that everyone single Arab has one of those three names. It surprises me how people could generalize a population with no evidence.