The informant is a fellow student and a good friend. While going out for smoothies, she shared her Filipino culture with me.

“I’m going to give you a heads up, so ‘ikau’ mean ‘you.’ So they would say, ‘What’s an example of an ugly cow?’ And then someone would say, ‘what?’ And then they would be like, ‘IKAU!’

Background & Analysis

The informant thinks this joke is really corny, but she still uses it with other Filipino people a lot. She learned it from Filipino friends in grade school, who had probably heard it from older brothers and sisters.

This is a more contemporary joke, because it’s in english, but makes use of a pun in tagalog. This joke most likely then originated among subsequent Filipino-American generation children here in the U.S.