The Main Piece
“If your hand is bigger than your face then it means you have cancer.” After hearing that one usually puts their hand in front of their face and the performer slaps the performee with their own hand.
Background Information
My informant is my roommate, Sarah Kwan. She is an undergraduate at USC and considers herself a hilarious person making people laugh at the jokes she tells. She enjoys telling this joke because she feels it is a “old-school classic.” She can recall when her own friend pulled the joke on her when she was in high school and has used it to prank others ever since. It was a good way for her to make groups of people laugh, although it did not work all the time. Because of its “classic”-ness many people had heard of it and did not find it amusing, however she continues to use it despite naysayers’ attitudes.
Context
This joke was performed in front of me and a couple other of my roommates. Unfortunately, many of my roommates did not particularly enjoy the joke, but it was an ice breaker as we half heartedly laughed at the joke. This may have occurred because of the fact that we were only a couple of weeks into the school year and did not know each other too well.
Personal Thoughts
I felt her attempt to break the ice with this joke had good intentions even if it did not work out the way she expected it to. It also revealed to me the usefulness of a joke and how these joke would get passed down from person to person, not necessarily being told by one another as stories are, but in the way that pranks are pulled on each other, thus creating a chain reaction of jokes or pranks.
Category Archives: Game
Turkey Wishbone
The informant is a 21 year old male, studying in New York. He recounts his memories of a game he used to play with his family.
me: can you tell me a little bit about this tradition?
When we were little and we used to have turkey, when we would get to the wishbone and we would take the wishbone and dry it in the oven… dry it in the oven to dry it out… and then two people would take each end of the wishbone and pull in opposite directions and it would break, oh and the wishbone is shaped like a Y, I’m pretty sure its the sternum, and whomever umm got the bigger piece would get to make a wish, like when it’s broken, the bottom of the Y would end up only on one side and so one person would get that and the other person wouldn’t.
me: do you have a specific memory of doing this?
not a specific memory, but we used to always make rotisserie turkey, like it used to be a family thing, we made the marinade and made the turkey and everyone helped with something. It was something that we did pretty often. When I think about it I remember how much fun we used to have seeing who would get the wishbone in their food and then all the suspense while it was drying, and then the person who got the wishbone would get to picj who they wanted to pull on the other side, and that was always really hard because I have a ton of siblings and also my parents really loved to play too. And early on it was fun because with any superstition like that, you want to be the one who gets to make the wish and later on it was fun because of the tradition.
ANALYSIS:
Having participated in this tradition myself, I feel very connected to this piece. It is very common for everyone but especially kids to look for any and all ways to make wishes, ie eyelashes, shooting stars, specific times on the clock. This wish holding belief is especially fun in that it requires suspense and a bit of a game!
Fan Lhor
LS is from Thailand. She explained the folk superstition surrounding eating. According to L, “If you eat the last piece of food on a plate, you’ll get a hot boyfriend, or a fan lhor as we call it.” Food is generally shared in Thailand, served family style with a bunch of plates in the middle of the table that everyone eats from. L told me that this was a favorite custom of hers because all her family and friends took it very seriously. She explains how you say “fan lhor” as you reach for the food. “Whenever we were at the end of the meal,” L recounts, “me and friends would all shout it [fan lhor] and race for the last piece. We always wanted a hot boyfriend, obviously.”
I love this custom because it is so much fun. I have seen L perform this in person at a few dinners. It is a natural thing for her to do at the end of a meal because she is so used to doing it at home. The custom captures the spirit of Thai meals, which are meant to be lively affairs with a big group of people.
I believe the custom exists because it encourages people to finish all of the food served by making a fun game out of it. Table manners are such an interesting part of a culture because they vary greatly. In some cultures it is rude to be aggressive and loud at the table, but in Thailand it is encouraged. Furthermore, these dining customs encourage good eating habits in a fun way. Folklore has this power to stick in our minds because it is performed for us in such casual, quotidian ways. It is easier to remember folklore than traditional rules or literature because it is so informal that it can be repeated and reheard daily.
Gotcha!
My father always plays this ridiculous game with us. The premise is fairly simple: you inconspicuously hold out your hand (below your waist!) in an “OK” formation, meaning thumb and pointer in an “O,” other fingers out. If a friend (or in our case, a son or daughter) sees the hand, you get to punch him.
I asked my dad where he learned this, he said,
“It’s something we used to always play as kids. On the playground or in class or at home we’d always sneakily try to fool our friends just so we could punch them. Living in a house with four boys, sometimes this game got a little out of hand…”
Forty years later he passed it on to his kids. My dad isn’t very mature; he still finds this game wildly amusing. And it really is. Fooling someone into looking at your hand just so you can smack them on the arm is a great time. What I love about this game is that it can be “played” whenever. We’ll have a hiatus for an entire year, and my dad pulls out the hand signal, gets my brother to look down, and all hell breaks loose. It becomes a war of trickery and flying fists.
I asked my father what this game is called and he couldn’t remember. I’ve decided to call it “Gotcha!” because this is how my dad likes to mock us whenever we fall for the trick and get punched on the arm.
Simple games such as Gotcha! are interesting because they don’t really offer the same value as full-fledged sports or card games due, yet they are so popular in our culture. All ages and all types of people know games like paddy cake or hot hands. These games’ simplicity is probably the reason for their popularity. There is zero setup or materials required, and the rules are so minimal that anyone can learn to play in seconds. Because of this, these types of games become widespread. It amazes me how much entertainment humans can get out of simply messing with each other. Our capacity to create captivating competitive games out of nothing is astounding.
CARD
“Oh my god guys no this was like actually so scary. Okay I was like eleven years old… how old are you when you’re in sixth grade? I was at sleepwaway camp in the middle of bumfuck West Virginia. One rainy day me and my friend were looking for board games to bring back to our cabin because all of our activities got cancelled for the day. And we found a Ouija board. Me and my friend had never used one but we had heard about them. This was an old closet. Like Ouija board tucked in the back of it. We bring it back to our cabin, and convince everyone to do the Ouija board with us. The counselor was like, Yeah lets do it. So we go in our cubby room, which is a small dark room in the back of the cabin, sit in a circle with candles. My counselor was the only one who had ever used a a Ouija board because we were all eleven and no one had used that shit. So my friend and my counselor go on the Ouija board and start to ask it questions, like you’re supposed to. They ask pretty normal questions, like “what’s your name,” and the board spelled out Card, like C-A-R-D, its name was Card. Um… it said it went to our camp and it lived in cabin 25 in 1989. And then we made the mistake of asking “Did you die here?” Card said yes. So we just put it away, we were like whaatt … we were these eleven year old scared dweebs and we just put it away. Later that day we go to the dining hall for dinner and my friend who I found the Ouija board with, we were in line to get food and in the dining hall… each summer makes a plaque for their cabin and they can decorate it however, and they’re attached to the rafters in this huge dining hall. Hundreds of them. My friend pokes me on the shoulder and points to one specific plaque. This is where shit gets wild. The only thing painted on the plaque was a Ouija board, with all black letters except in red was CARD 1989 and at the bottom it said Cabin 25. And I just ran away I was freaking out. I was crying in the dining hall. Everyone was just like what? We couldn’t even express ourselves. My camp is haunted by Card. Next time I went there I tried to find the plaque and it was fairly hidden amongst the other hundreds of plaques. We just happened to see it that day, which is scary.”
Background: The informant told this piece with a lot of excitement because everything in her story had happened in such a creepy, ironic way. The fact that she was able to spot out the plaque right after this Ouija board experience was very creepy. Now, it doesn’t mean as much to her as it did back then, because she now believes it could have been a trick played on her by her counselor, but she is still unsure and remembers very vividly how terrified she was of what had happened that day. I think this piece is very interesting and I like the aesthetic presented of a boring, rainy day at camp turned into a creepy ghost story. This seems very typical of a bizarre experience that a young child might experience at a camp, those of which have been told many times and exaggerated, about for example ghosts haunting certain cabins and such. This was a very interesting story for me to hear as I did not attend summer camps like these every summer as the informant did.