“My grandpa would tell us the following: ‘You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead.’ (laughs) The companion one was ‘A bird in the hand makes blowing your nose very difficult.’”
What did they mean to you?
“The first thing they meant was that they were funny. Clearly it was about poking fun at old and real proverbs. But also to emphasize that you should be happy with what you’ve got. But mostly it was about being funny (laughs).”
Context:
The informant is my father. He was raised Jewish and grew up on the East Coast of the United States. This information was collected during a family zoom call where we were checking in with each other.
Analysis:
These punny proverbs subvert the “original” ones and give them new meaning. If you don’t know the original proverbs (“you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” and “a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush”), these jokes wouldn’t be funny to you. If you are familiar with these proverbs, the unexpected punchline will elicit a giggle. This remix of original proverbs is a microcosm of how people manipulate and change “canonical” content, make it their own, and share it with others.
“So, I only say ‘go bears’ ironically. We say “go bears” when someone says or does something really stupid, like when someone walks into a stop sign, like any stupid things. I say it truthfully to alumni when they prompt me to, but I pretty much only say it as a joke. My friends have started doing it as well, yeah, other people on the Berkeley meme page do it also.”
Context:
The informant is my friend. He is a sophomore at UC Berkeley and is Jewish. The mascot of UC Berkeley is the bear. This information was collected during a FaceTime call.
Analysis:
This is an example of a subversion of an institutional phrase. Like at most universities, slogans are supposed to be a statement of school pride. However, seeing as the youth like to subvert institutions, students tend to not take these slogans seriously and instead turn them into jokes. In this case, the phrase “Go Bears” has turned from a slogan for school pride into a reaction for when someone does something dumb. The punchline of the joke is “wow, people who go to UC Berkeley aren’t actually very bright, and the school shouldn’t take as much pride in itself is it does.”
“My favorite holocaust joke, it’s actually appropriate. A man, he’s in heaven, and the man goes to meet god, and he tells god a holocaust joke, and god doesn’t laugh, so he says ‘I guess you had to be there!’”
Context:
The informant is my friend. He is a sophomore at UC Berkeley and is Jewish. The Holocaust was the mass genocide of Jewish people, alongside others, during World War II. This information was collected during a FaceTime call.
Analysis:
Holocaust jokes are categorized by some as “edgy humor” while for others they are considered to be an unspeakable crime. Personally, the only people who have ever recited Holocaust jokes to my face are other Jewish people. The punchline of this joke is that the man telling it to God died during the Holocaust. Even though it feels wrong and disrespectful, there is something liberating about telling jokes that poke fun at the suffering of your own group and laughing at it as a community. I would feel differently if a non-Jew told one to me, because as a member of the out-group, they haven’t had the same life experiences I have.
AK: You don’t really see much of him these days right?
YJ: Yeah not even the Chris Hansen memes survived
AK: Have you seen the Finnish version of it?
YJ: The what?
AK: Finland mutated Pedo-Bear into something completely random, but it’s still a bear or something
YJ: What for?
AK: I think they wanted to gatekeep and make fun of new people on their image board sites, I think he’s called Spurdo
YJ: Does it work? I’m not sure really how to describe it, like what sort of posts do you even attach the image to? How does gatekeeping with a character even work?
AK: It’s like stylized broken english but you replace the hard-sounding consonants with lots of G’s and D’s. So the most common example would be “f*ck being” turned into the more soft sounding “fug”.
Take any phrase, long quote, or even a song and start making edits for it. It’s like an overly specific cultural mutation of mad libs. You can basically apply it to anything you want.
Background:
The informant, AK, is longtime friend of mine who I bonded with over videogames and other entertainment mediums. He is well versed in image board culture after having spent over a decade on multiple forums when the internet was starting to burgeon out into a more curated environment. Spurdo to AK is one of his favorites for being absolutely nonsensical and how it can universally applied to franchises and jokes he already enjoys.
Context:
When memes were on the table for the project, I pondered with my friend over which were the ones that were most relevant to our own experiences and these were the results of our brainstorming.
My Thoughts:
An example of Practical Jokes and liminal experiences showcased in Example 4 where those in the In-Group get to mess around with the new recruits who have yet to go through the same bonding experience.
The Spurdo meme is one of the more esoteric and absurdist memes to come out of early image board culture and it provides a digital version of the historic-geographic method of studying how folklore travels and Spurdo has mutated no less than three times in its lifespan across different internet environments. The original Finnish mutation of pedo-bear used by the Finnish has since been carried over to the western “American” context and been turned into either a commercial retail worker, a stereotypical fat American addicted to fast food, or a highly conservative-nationalistic spokesperson for gun violence. The Finnish context remains as it is but has become adopted by the people who served in the military over their shared experiences. Somewhere in between, Spurdo further mutates from absurdity into the abstract, losing its legs and becoming what is known as a “Gondola”. Instead of speaking the way it usually does, it doesn’t speak at all and only observes its surroundings peacefully, and this descriptor has made it photoshopped in many pieces of classic artwork in the background simply observing its surroundings.
The informant, in this case, is my father, F, who was a first generation immigrant born to an Ukrainian/Scottish family in Canada in 1950. His family was poor and working class, and he lived in Canada for many years before attending schools in England, and eventually moving back to Canada before moving with my mother to Los Angeles, in the United States, so she could take a job as a university professor. My brother and I were born a few years after.
Context:
My father told me this joke at dinner once. He asked me if I wanted to hear a Ukrainian joke and I said sure.
Performance:
F: “You are a Ukrainian soldier in the trenches, the Germans coming from one side, the Russians from the other. Who do you shoot first? Answer: The German. Business before pleasure.”
Thoughts:
I think this is probably considered an offensive joke. It has a certain historical context, I suppose, but my father never provided any of his own thoughts on the joke, so all I can really do is to provide the joke in it’s original form. I do not think my father learned this joke from his father, I think he probably picked it up somewhere later in life. I tried to search online for traces of this joke, and I was able to find it but with the Ukrainian soldier replaced with a Polish one, so I guess it is re-told in that way and adopted by different cultures with a similar wartime history.
