Category Archives: Humor

Elementary School Vampire Joke

Main Performance:

The informant, TB, recounted a joke she picked up in elementary school.

TB: “What do you call a vampire in the winter?”

Me: “Hungry?”

TB: “Frostbite.”

Background:

She had heard this joke back in elementary school and latched onto the use of the punchline, so she decided to dedicate it to memory for whenever she needed a joke. It’s the sort of back pocket comedy that kids used to exchange and it stuck.

Thoughts:

These sort of jokes are a bookmark on a period of time in life when everyone is still forming a sense of humor, so the jokes that were told often had a repeated/memorized feeling like this one. I’ve heard it before as well, also from someone at school, and was reminded of that innocent test of knowledge that would take place during recess. The joke being more self indulgent for the teller, as their laugh comes from getting to tell the recipient the answer.

Delicate Riddle

Main Performance:

The informant, TB, was recounting a riddle she heard that made her laugh. I will be listed as AK.

TB: “What’s something so delicate that even saying it breaks it?”

AK: “What?”

TB: “You have to guess.”

AK: “Okay… trust?”

TB: “No.”

AK: “Wait- a secret!”

TB: “Hmm, close actually.”

AK: “I can’t think of anything else.”

TB: “Silence.”

Background:

The informant had heard the riddle in an online video where two people were playing a drinking game of trying to get the other person to drink by presenting a riddle their opponent couldn’t crack.

Context:

Notably, two of TB’s friends were around who had also seen the video, and when I said that I hadn’t, she wanted to test out one of the riddles on me. The others were laughing throughout as I struggled through multiple silences between responses, each time not hearing the answer that was in plain sight.

Thoughts:

The riddle has a witty twist of humor that almost makes the person subjected to the answer feel a bit stupid and silly for not knowing it. While being the most obvious response, it makes there a clear insider to the riddle and if you aren’t, the humor is a little bit at your expense. And this is something applicable to most riddles, but for this one it is a large point of contention.

Proverb: “Marry a rich man. They all look the same in the dark.”

Text:

SP: “Marry a rich man. They all look the same in the dark.”

Context:

The informant is my grandmother. She is an 83-year-old woman of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who was raised in New York City and currently lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey. SP said that her mother said this to her when she was a teenager or in her early twenties. She got married at 23. Her mother was sharp-tongued, outspoken, and funny. They had a very close relationship.

Analysis:

Proverbs tend to be didactic, often conveying their message through metaphor. In chapter eight of Elliot Oring’s ‘Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction,’ F. A. de Caro writes that, “Nonmetaphorical proverbs communicate through a direct statement of a presumed truth that supposedly applies to a situation, rather than by invoking a poetic image to which a situation is compared metaphorically” (de Caro 186). This proverb is blunt and probably hyperbolic, encouraging women to marry rich men because they’re ultimately the same. I think that this saying can be interpreted as cynical and sexist, neglecting women’s abilities to be self-sufficient and encouraging them to sacrifice their happiness for material wealth. It intends to dispel women of illusions about men and love. However, this proverb can also be read as subversive (especially considering that my grandmother heard it at a time when women occupied a lower social position than now), encouraging women to be cunning and look out for themselves and rejecting the idea that women should worship their husbands. It also is an example of how wisdom can be transferred from one generation of women to the next.

         Proverbs are almost always concise and easy to remember. This one is memorable because it’s so blunt and it conveys a jaded point of view, but also because it alludes to sex. Because female sexuality was so taboo at this time, so I imagine that such an allusion—even if it’s euphemistic—would be shocking.

Jewish Folktale: The Fools of Chelm Try to Capture the Moon in a Barrel of Water

Text:

LG: “In the town of Chelm, the people there were fools and one night they saw the moon in a barrel of water. So, they thought they would capture it, so they covered the barrel. So then, in the morning when they went back, it was gone. So, they thought it had been stolen, so they called the police. And the police came, and they had nothing to show them, so they all moaned and cried.”

Context:

The informant is my mother. She is a 57-year-old woman of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who was born in California and currently lives in New York City. Her father was a German-born Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi persecution as a child and her mother is the daughter of poor Russian Jewish immigrants. She feels very attuned to her Jewish heritage and culture and views this tale as an example of “shtetl humor.” She doesn’t remember where she first heard this story, but recently discovered an iteration of it in the writings of Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Analysis:

This folktale is one of many which discuss the Jewish town of Chelm, where “inhabitants acquired a reputation for being good and well meaning, though foolish” (Patai and Oettinger). I think this tale conveys some of the defining qualities of Jewish humor, which is often acerbic and endearingly critical, however, it’s not merely making fun of stupidity. As Raphael Patai and Ayelet Oettinger write, the foolishness in these stories “can be seen as a sort of backward logic that satirizes the process of Jewish theological reasoning” (Patai and Oettinger). In this instance, the people of Chelm’s effort to capture the moon is an allegory about faith, where God, like the moon, is astonishing and powerful, but elusive and cannot be physically captured. I think this story is also a critique of the hubristic desire to see God and understand divinity.

Citations:

Patai, Raphael, and Ayelet Oettinger. “Chelm, the Wise of.” Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, edited by Haya Bar-Itzhak, and Raphael Patai, Routledge, 1st edition, 2013. Credo Reference, https://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sharpejft/chelm_the_wise_of/0?institutionId=887. Accessed 27 Apr. 2022.

Another iteration of this folktale is given in a block quote which follows the third paragraph of this essay:

Rogovin, Or. “Chelm as Shtetl: Y. Y. Trunk’s Khelemer Khakhomim.” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, vol. 29, no. 2, spring 2009, pp. 242+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A223824114/LitRC?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=65b43ad2. Accessed 27 Apr. 2022.

Twitter Slang: “Drinking from the mother lake”

Text:

FC: “There’s a saying, when someone serves seismically, you say that they drank from the mother lake. And the mother lake’s not a real lake, believe it or not. It’s kind of a metaphorical, symbolic source of power for, like, motherly behavior. And motherly behavior, anyone who serves, who delivers some sort of jaw-dropping performance, piece of media, they’re mother. They’re queen, they support me, they nurse me. And in order to gain those powers, that ability, they had to drink from the mother lake. The primordial source of power.”

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old college student from St. Louis, Missouri who has been using Twitter since his early teens. He describes the community he occupies on the app as “stan Twitter,” which is an online community of young people who bond over their fandom for certain musical artists or pop culture interests. Stan Twitter has a specific sense of humor and vernacular, much of which is derived from the cultural practices of the LGBTQ community, of which which many members of the online subculture are members. Black drag queens in particular are responsible for the creation and proliferation of much of the language employed by stan Twitter users.

“It’s very common to talk about celebrities, music icons as, you know, people say “queen” and a lot of that comes from LGBTQ slang, like drag slang,” FC said. He believes that the term “mother,” a reverential term colloquially applied to usually female artists whose work an individual finds exceptional or resonant, was taken from drag and ballroom culture. Since many people involved in these subcultures found themselves alienated from or rejected by their families because of their queerness, drag houses and drag families, or communities of queer people and drag performers, substituted as the kind of support networks which traditional families usually provide. In these groups, “there’s always a mother of the drag family who is the most experienced queen or ballroom performer with the most knowledge and experience to share,” FC said. “They are just held on a very high pedestal and their abilities and servery is applauded, and I think that’s a lot of where ‘mother’ comes from.”

FC described how stan Twitter humor often involves taking one foundational joke or vernacular element, and continually modulating it into absurd derivations. He thinks that the term “drinking from the mother lake” formed through this process, beginning with trends of calling artists “queen” and “mother” and coming up with increasingly extreme, peculiar, and culturally specific ways to express this same admiration.

Analysis:

         This slang term, and slang used on stan Twitter in general, is deeply grounded in LGBTQ history and identity. Young people on this platform connect with previous generations of queer people by using their language and traditions, arguably creating a community or uniting people of queer identities through common experiences or a common culture. Moreover, stan Twitter users form a community by fostering common interests, a sense of humor, and a vernacular style often derived from culturally specific references. To understand the linguistic traditions used by this community, one must understand what the lingo refers to and how humor functions on the platform. Someone’s ability to employ these vernacular traditions, communicate, be funny, or find others funny identifies them as a member of the community, as a member of the in-group, and provides the opportunity to bond with others who share interests and experiences.

The collaborative process by which this slang term evolved strikes me as particularly folkloric. There is no individual author, instead, people add onto each other’s versions, with different derivations branching off and becoming popular in different circles. With every iteration, a new dimension of strangeness and cultural specificity is added, so appreciation for a song or an artist can be expressed by saying that such artist “drank from the mother lake.”