Tag Archives: irony

“Waikao”

Text: ‘Waikao’: spoken in Fiji when you say something that is meant to be understood in an ironic sense. Not literal. Then the listener thinks about what you might mean and it is nearly always a funny meaning. So after ‘waikao’ is laughter. In English we used to say ‘psych!’ for a similar effect, but not quite the same since ‘psych’ is kind of teasing the person you are talking to, but waikao is more a collective fun. We don’t have that expression in English.”

Context: JW served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji in the two years following his undergraduate studies and picked up ‘waikao’ (pronounced “why-cow”) during his time in the village where he taught. He reports that the structure is always the same: a literal-sounding statement, then the marker, then a beat for the listener’s reinterpretation, then, ideally, shared laughter. He noted that the phrase is unlikely to appear in any Fijian dictionary, noting that the dictionaries available during his service were written by missionaries in the 1800s and the living spoken language had drifted considerably from them. He is not sure whether ‘waikao’ remains current today or was simply trendy at the time. 

Analysis: ‘Waikao’ is a discourse marker that retroactively reframes a prior utterance as ironic and invites the listener to construct the joke for themselves. Both ‘waikao’ and English ‘psych!’ are post-hoc ironic markers, but the social geometry differs. ‘Psych!’ involves the speaker pulling the rug from under a particular listener. ‘Waikao’ is collective and constructive, with the speaker handing the listener a small interpretive task and the laughter arriving when the listener completes it. As folk speech the form is stable across speakers (‘waikao’ marker is fixed) while the content varies entirely with what was just said. That JW learned the word from oral use rather than any printed source is appropriate of linguistic folklore: missionary-compiled Fijian dictionaries recorded the formal vocabulary, but casual phrases and terms like ‘waikao’ are exactly what might slip through the cracks of such projects to document a living language. 

Solovino

Age: 20

Text:

“Solovino”

Context:

The informer tells me that this is a popular dog name in El Salvador, especially for stray dogs-turned-pets, and it means “he came alone”. They learned about this through their parents, but have heard it on Spanish shows like comedy novellas. They initially thought that it was a Salvadorian thing, but learned later that this name was popular in Mexico as well.

Analysis:

Many parts of Latin America–including El Salvador–have large populations of stray dogs who wander into stores and homes seeking food or shelter. Many of these dogs seem to be informally adopted simply because they showed up, hence the name Solovino. It’s like a playful acknowledgment of the dog’s lifestory–he just appeared, and was welcomed. I feel like this may reflect the importance of generosity in Latin culture, where it is extended to family, community, and even strangers(like the passing stray dog). How common this practice must be, for it to reach even social and cultural media, and to have its own variations across Latin America!

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” … “Because it was stupid.”

Text: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” … “Because it was stupid.”

Minor Genre: Joke, Anti-Humor

Context:

M said, “When my oldest daughter B was three, she told this joke, and everyone thought it was hilarious. She was telling it to my dad and she was trying to tease him back for all of the teasing he was doing to her.”

Analysis:

Although I don’t remember my original telling of the joke, this joke has been repeated frequently over the years in my family, its hilarity stemming from the idea that someone – a three year old girl, no less – had finally put my joke-loving grandfather in his place. I grew up hearing jokes all of the time from my grandfather, who loves to tease people. This joke arose likely as a combination of frustration about hearing the same joke one too many times and a desire to make him laugh.

It is interesting to look at this joke outside of my familial context, as it serves as an example of “anti-humor.” Anti-humor is a branch of humor that relies on irony and reversals in order to create a surprise factor within an already-familiar joke. This is ironic, because the traditional form of the joke (“Why did the chicken cross the road?… To get to the other side.”) is already seen as an example of anti-humor. The listener expects a funny punchline, but instead receive a flat statement about what is logical. In turn, my family’s joke is an anti-anti-humor: the listener expects the traditional answer, “to get to the other side,” and instead receives an abrupt quip: “because it was stupid.”

A Tale of Two Onions

Nationality: Irish-Armenian American
Age: 19
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: April 19, 2013
Primary Language: English

Form of Folklore:  Humor

Informant Bio:  The informant was born and raised primarily in Glendale, California; he only left the United States for a two year period (from age fourteen to fifteen) to live in London, England.  Most of his knowledge of folklore is from his mother (of Irish decent), his father (of Persian-Armenian decent), and media such as the internet and television.

Context:  The interview was conducted in the living room of another informant’s house in the presence of two other informants.

Item:    So this is a story about… about love really, that you’ll wanna hear. It’s a story about these two onions; a man onion and a woman onion who’ve just come out of college and they’re ready to take on the world and see all that it has to offer and they meet and fall in love, they start dating you know and it’s all going extremely well and… one day after they’ve been dating a few months, they decide…they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna take the plunge, their gonna tie the knot and get married.  So they have all their family over and a beautiful ceremony and it’s the perfect day these two… onions could have imagined.  And they have a fantastic honeymoon laid out for them, they make love for the first time and it’s beautiful and magical experience.  And uh something happens that night… and nine months later a little bundle of joy… a little baby cocktail onion… is born.  And the parents are of course ecstatic… but like all parents they’re completely unprepared for the strain that this puts on their relationship.  And the financial trouble is the worst; the mother, she gotta take on a part time job ta earn more money and the father’s gotta take on more shifts down at the docks, where he works…. And unfortunately the little baby onion isn’t as well looked after as he might be.  And he’s got his parents spunk and… zeal for life so this… rambunctious little thing… one day he… wanders out of the house, rolls into the street, gets flattened by a truck.  He gets rushed to the hospital.  A team of surgeons fight all night to save his life.  The mother onion, she’s gotta be sedated, she’s just out of it, she can’t even handle the stress.  The father onion is rolling up and down outside the emergency room wearing a groove in the ghastly hospital carpet that they have there.  Finally, towards dawn, after hours of worrying, the surgeon bursts through the doors… he’s a radish… and teas his surgical mask from his face and whips the sweat away, stands panting next to the emergency room door.  The father onion rolls up to him earnestly “What?  What’s going on with my son?  What? Tell me!”  And the surgeon says, “well…. he’ll live….. but he’s gonna be a vegetable for the rest of his life.

Informant Comments:  The informant has never been able to tell this joke with out laughing at least part of the way.  The response he usually gets from those who hear this joke is anger or frustration in the form of curse words; the informant loves to see this response.  He believes the story of the struggles of the two onions is more humorous than the actual punch line.  The purpose of the joke is to have the listener go through the different life altering events of two vegetables and their child only to find out that the child is going to be a vegetable after his accident (which he clearly already is).

Analysis:  Unlike most jokes, the punch line of this joke is not what makes it funny.  From personal experience, I can say that hearing the joke a second time (while knowing the punch line) makes the joke much more humorous.  This is mainly because the listener can appreciate the irony of the ending throughout the entire telling of the tale of the two onions and their son.  The joke makes the listener accept the idea that the onions of the story are like people and thus have lives similar to human’s.  In the end, when the cocktail onion is deemed a vegetable, as in brain death, the listeners are torn from the originally accepted personification of the onions and into reality, where onions are vegetables no matter what.  This joke can annoy many listeners who wanted to go along with the fictitious world where the onions behave like humans; particularly, when it was all done for a weak punch line.

Iced Tea

Form of Folklore:  Humor

Informant Bio:  The informant was born and raised in Glendale, California.  Most of the folklore he has been exposed to comes primarily from his father, who is of Arabic decent.  Other folklore has been attained either through media sources (i.e. Reddit) or through personal life experiences in America.

Context:  The interview was conducted in the living room of another informant’s house in the presence of two other informants.

Item:    A man walks into a cafe and asks the person working there if he has iced tea.  The person says, “No we don’t” and the guys says “Ok” and leaves.  The next day, he comes back and asks the same thing:  “Do you have any iced tea?”  The person says, “No, I’m sorry, we don’t”; the guy leaves.  Comes back the third day, comes back the fourth day, fifth day, sixth day, does it over and over… until the seventh day, the cafe worker finally decides:  I should get some iced tea for him, so he makes some iced tea.  And when the guy shows up and says, “Do you have any iced tea?”  He says, “Yes I do!”  He says, “Ok, warm some up for me.”

Informant Comments:  After telling this joke, the informant immediately tried to redeem this joke by saying that it is funnier in Arabic.  He thinks it is a light joke that is based on the few times when customers are being difficult, but no one event in particular.  Even though most people do not laugh at the joke, the informer thinks it is fun to tell, simply to see people’s reactions.

Analysis:  Irony and repetition play a big part in this joke.  The customer repeatedly appears every day of an entire week until the cafe worker finally decides (on the seventh day) to get the customer what he believes is what the customer wants.  Once the seventh day comes, the customer asks for iced tea again and is told there is iced tea, but to the worker’s disappointment the customer asks him to heat it; thus, making hot tea, which was always available.  This irony is the actual punch line and is the reason why the worker would get frustrated with the difficult customer and would even roll their eyes at him.  It is clear that people identify with the worker more than the customer because the reactions of the people being told the joke is similar to the worker’s reaction to the customer’s request to heat up the iced tea.