Category Archives: Humor

What comes at the end of a rainbow?

Background: The informant is a 22 year old college student. They have a silly personality and love to tell jokes, and this is one that they have been telling their entire life. 

Informant: Let me tell you a joke. What comes at the end of a rainbow? What you ask? A “W”. Ahahahaha. 

Me: Where did you hear this joke first? Who told you it?

Informant: It is from, um, the internet. I looked up: “great jokes” and I found this one and nobody laughed at this joke so it’s been my life mission to make someone chuckle. 

Me: Who do you usually tell this joke to?

Informant: I tell this joke to all audiences because it’s very friendly. You can tell it to 5-year-olds, you can tell it to 85-year-olds. So I tell it to my grandpa, I tell it to my best friend, my grandma who has passed, unfortunately. So, I tell everyone these jokes because no one laughs and it puts a smile on their face because it makes them feel awkward. 

Reflection: Beyond hearing the joke itself, I think this interaction with the informant shows how jokes are used by people to determine who is in their ingroup. The informant said that when they tell this joke they are trying to make others laugh, and that most don’t find it funny. However, if someone does find this joke funny then the informant feels they can be close to that person. 

Afikoman with a twist

Background: Informant is a 19 year old, Jewish American/Argentinian college student. They are from the Chicago area but now live in Los Angeles. The informant has a family tradition during the holiday of passover that inverts the common tradition of many other Jewish people. 

Informant: So, during passover (the Jewish holiday), there’s a tradition that most families do where the parents have to hide the Afikoman which is a little piece of matzah, an the kids have to find it and whichever kid finds it gets a special prize. But in my family we do the opposite. So, the kids have to hide the Afikoman and it’s my dad’s job to go look for it and find it. But the tradition and the joke is that he doesn’t get up from the Seder table, he sits in his chair when it’s time to go look for it and bribes us with money to tell him where it is. And that’s the kids prize it’s not like, you get a prize for finding it; you get a prize for revealing to him where it is. So for example he’ll be like, “5 dollars.” And we’re like, no that’s not enough cause’ it’s a really good hiding place. And he’s like, “10 dollars.” And then we always, like, talk him up and negotiate to like, 25 bucks. And this is without him getting up from the table to even look for it. 

Reflection: This story came from the informants family flipping a traditional Jewish tradition on it’s head. In Jewish tradition, looking for the Afikoman is something that kids do in the ages before 13, so having the parent who is an adult search is a funny twist on it. Beyond that, there is an aspect of the tradition that is capitalistic as the kids are putting monetary value on the hiding place of the matzah, focusing on how they can bargain with the adult to receive the most money. This reflects an American twist on a Jewish tradition, as it adds American values of capital and money into Jewish culture.

Pirate joke

Background: Informant is an 18 year old Jewish-American from Chicago, IL. They have a background in theatre and loves to tell jokes with their family. The informant says that their father, an actor, told them this joke.

Informant: My dad told me this joke when I was younger and it is one of the first jokes I ever memorized and I liked it because it was inappropriate. If somebody asks me to tell a joke it;s the first thing that comes to mind veen though I know it’s not a good one. 

A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel in his pants. The bartender says, “hey why do you have a steering wheel in your pants?” and the pirate goes, “aaaaar it’s driving me nuts!”

Reflection: I really enjoyed hearing my friend tell me this joke because it was really cheesy and I ahd heard a similar one before. I thought it was interesting how they mentioned that they liked it as a child due to it’s inappropriate nature, showing how children often cling to taboo subjects. This joke is also particularly funny in how it relies on the person’s delivery to make the other laugh. It requires a sense of theatricality that my informant had!

Moss Back.

L is a 78-year-old Caucasian male originally from Meridian, Mississippi. L is a retired drill sergeant and veteran of the American war in Vietnam.

While visiting Phoenix, Arizona I met with L to discuss folklore, as he had previously helped me collect war stories for an oral history project. I met L at his Phoenix office where he provided me with two scary stories he remembered from his past. The following is the second of these two stories, which he first heard as a boy in the late 1950s.

L: Moss Back, Um.. I think it was a Cherokee Indian… What happened? Trying to think, guess we’ll see, he gets his head cut off.. and uh, then he goes around looking for his head. You know laughs and you could hear him moaning at night when he’s coming through the brush and through the trees. So you didn’t want to go out at night and you didn’t want to hear “Moss Baaack.. Moss Baaack’s coming..” laughs Oh God, probably seven eight years old when I first heard it. It was really funny, uh, so at church we had a group called “RA’s” Royal Ambassadors. So we had a ball team we played softball and that kinda stuff so we had, I’ll never forget him. He was our assistant pastor to church and he did all the stuff with the boys. We had some friends that had a lake out in the country about ten miles outside of Meridian.. and so he fixed up a deal to throw us camping out there and fishing, an overnight stay at the lake. So, we fished that day and you know uh did some swimming and fishing and all kinda stuff. And then that evening, they built a big ol’ camp fire. And they started telling us ghost stories you know laughs and Moss Back was one of ‘em and all kinds, all kinds of stuff and here’s a bunch of boys from.. seven eight, to ten maybe twelve. Um, so we listened to all these stories.. and there was somebody I don’t remember who it was, but there was another man there helping the Pastor out. And they said ok said, uh, “you boys”, uh, you know “go on to bed and do whatever you’re going to do and we’re going to go on and fish for a while there’s good fishing out here at night.” So they got in this boat and paddled out into this lake. Well, they went to the other side and came around through the dark laughs and we’re all sitting around here heard all these ghost stories you know laughs and here they come you know they got right up close to us and they went “Moss Baaack’s a comin Moss Baaack’s a comin!” laughs imitates scream we jump up running in every direction laughs oh my God! laughs boy they got us good. They, they likely scared us out of a year’s growth you know.

Reflection: L provided a great example of a common way folk have historically interacted ostensively with scary stories, pranking. The ”insiders” with knowledge of a scary story tend to prank the ”outsiders” (those without knowledge of the scary story) as an act of initiation for transitioning from ”insiders” to ”outsiders” of the story. As L’s account demonstrates, this often takes the form of the ”insiders” pretending to be the monster featured in the scary story in order to frighten the ”outsiders.” Moss Back as a character appears to be based on racially problematic history, as beheading is a known method of execution that American settlers used to punish Native American populations.

STEM Majors be like I’m taking a break from mental health for school.

Text: STEM Majors be like I’m taking a break from mental health for school.

Context:

Context of performance: Discord call between myself, informant, and a mutual friend. Mutual friend and I are both STEM majors, and were complaining about how stressed we are. Informant is an art major and cracked the joke during the call.

Informant: It’s like…it’s like a play on, the mental health campaigns right now, y’know? Like people taking a break from like, school and work and stuff for mental health? Like I’m always reading that, that like, people are um taking gap years from school, for like mental health. Y’know that like catchphrase to take a break from school for mental health?

Informant: and just like, none of y’all [our mutual friends who are also all STEM majors] are, like, popping off mentally [translation: doing well mentally].

Personal Thoughts:

This joke was particularly funny in this circumstance for a variety of reasons. First, the person telling the joke was an “outsider looking in” – the informant is an art major mocking the suffering of STEM majors. Second, all three of us in this conversation have the background context to make this joke funny (we are all part of a folk group). This context includes a deep understanding of the rigorous course-load of a STEM major, in addition to knowledge about “our generation” pushing to prioritize mental health over academics.

What makes this joke funny, then, is the irony that STEM students instead prioritize their academic education over their mental health. I would bet that other members of this particular group – STEM students – would also find this joke funny (if not also a bit painful).