“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.
Context: This joke was told by one of my coworkers at a boba place. We had closed early that day and the manager had brought us pizza, so we ate and took turns telling jokes. I chimed in and asked if I could use some of them for my folklore project, to which my coworker (KC) agreed. This is the last joke that she told us.
Story:
“An old married couple went out for dinner one night. The wife suddenly shouted ‘Oh crap, I forgot to turn off the stove, there could be a fire’. She urged her husband to hurry home with her. The husband thought about it for a while, then comforted her saying ‘don’t worry, I also forgot to turn off the faucet.’”
Background: My coworker got this joke from her dad, who heard it from his dad. She thought the joke was funny because it played off of stereotypes of old couples in China and how they are always forgetful. The punchline is that while the wife forgot to turn off the stove, the house wouldn’t burn down because the husband also forgot to turn off the faucet and left the water running.
Thoughts: This joke actually made me laugh out loud, and the punchline is pretty unique. One thing that I’ve learned from hearing a lot of Chinese jokes through my parents, friends, and different television channels is that there are a lot of jokes about old married couples where the wife is often annoyed at the husband and the husband often has to comfort the wife. The funny part of most of these jokes is that at least one of the two is forgetful of something. I’ve often seen my parents and friend’s parents point to each other and say “that’s you” jokingly when they hear an old married couple joke, which I think sheds insight into how the joke contributes to Chinese culture in the sense that these stereotypes have at least some sort of universal truth to them.
Context: This joke was told by one of my coworkers at a boba place. We had closed early that day and the manager had brought us pizza, so we ate and took turns telling jokes. I chimed in and asked if I could use one of them for my folklore project, to which my coworker (KC) agreed. This is the second joke that she told us.
Story:
KC in Mandarin: “谁最知道猪?”
Roman Phonetic: “shei zui zhi dao zhu”
Transliterated:
shei: who
zui: the most
zhi dao: knows
zhu: pig
Translation: Who knows pigs the best?
Everyone after thinking about it for a while: “Who?”
KC in Mandarin: “蜘蛛人”
Roman Phonetic: “zhi zhu ren”
Transliterated:
zhi zhu: Spider
zhi: know
zhu: pig
ren: man
Translation: Spiderman (Know-pig man)
Background: My coworker got this joke online when she was getting ready to tell us jokes. The punchline is based on a pun, because the Chinese word for spider (zhi zhu) also sounds like the combination of the words, “know” (zhi) and “pig” (zhu). So the answer to the riddle of who knows pigs the best is Spiderman, which can also be read as Know-pig man or man who knows pigs.
Thoughts: I found this joke to be pretty funny, because I didn’t know that Chinese jokes, like jokes in English, frequently used puns. There are many variants of jokes that play off of the word “Spiderman” that are and have been popular in China and in Asian communities. An example of another joke using spiderman is playing off phrases that sound like “shi bai de ren”, which can mean many different things in Mandarin, but plays off of the fact that “shi bai de” ni Mandarin sounds like “spider” in English and “ren” means man.
