Item (direct transcription):
A Mexican with an erection runs into a wall. What does he break?
His lawnmower.
Background Information:
The informant read the joke on 9GAG, an online social media site.
Contextual Information:
The informant made it very clear that he would only tell the joke to someone he knew very well and was confident wouldn’t be offended.
Analysis:
This joke is a clear example of blason populaire, playing on the stereotype that all Mexicans are gardeners.
Item (direct transcription):
So, what happens is… a guy… he’s having some… poop problems. Okay? He goes to the doctor and he says, “Doctor, there’s something wrong. What happens is, when I eat an apple I literally poop out the apple I just ate. Like, whole, you know. Like, it’s a frickin’ apple, you know what I mean? I eat a doughnut, it’s still a doughnut. Okay? I eat a—You get what I mean, Doc?!”
The doctor’s like, “So, yeah, uhh, what’s the problem?”
He’s like, “I can’t poop! Think about it: I eat food and it just goes straight out, whole!”
So the doctor’s like, “Have you considered just eating poo?”
Background Information:
The informant first heard this joke from a friend in 6th grade.
Contextual Information:
Interestingly, the informant doesn’t believe that the joke would only be appropriate to tell between children. On the contrary, he believes that this joke is an example of cross-generational “toilet humor.” When he was younger, he enjoyed sharing this type of joke with his father.
Analysis:
The joke has the qualities of a typical children’s joke focusing on obscenity play and absurdity. Human excrement is often a good topic for children’s humor, since it lends itself to these categories.
Also, the joke is genuinely rather witty.
Item (direct transcription):
What did the Boston bombers do that Hitler didn’t?
End the race.
Background Information:
The informant read the joke on 9GAG, an online social media site.
Contextual Information:
The informant made it very clear that he would only tell the joke to someone he knew very well and was confident wouldn’t be offended.
Analysis:
This joke fits the common pattern of jokes forming in response to tragic events. In this case, the effect is double, because the joke makes fun of tragedy of both the Boston Bombing and the Holocaust.
Item (direct transcription):
So, the professor was something like a computer visions expert, right?
So the joke was, if he’s such a visions expert, why didn’t he see this coming?
Background Information:
The informant read this joke on Facebook; it was posted by someone from USC (the University of Southern California).
Bosco Tjan was a USC professor who was murdered by one of his students in 2016. The joke refers to those events.
Contextual Information:
The informant expressed that he would only tell the joke to someone he knew well and thought wouldn’t be offended.
Analysis:
This joke fits the common pattern of jokes forming in response to tragic events. Interestingly, though, in this case the event was not a national or widely publicized—it would only make sense to members of the USC community.
Thus, the joke is a counter-example to Christie Davies’ hypothesis from “Jokes That Follow Mass-Mediated Disasters in a Global Electronic Age” (from the book “Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture,” 2003). Davies claims that jokes about tragic events form as a counter-impulse to hegemonic pressure from the mass media (particularly television) to feel sorrow for strangers. There was no such hegemonic pressure after the murder of Bosco Tjan, yet this joke formed anyways.
Main Piece:
The following is transcribed from a conversation between the performer (EC) and I (ZM).
EC: My favorite joke of all time…I think I told this on the Weekender. I tell it every year on the Weekender, but…What’s the difference between a dirty bus stop and a um lobster with implants? …One’s a crusty bus station and the other’s a busty crustacean.
ZM: (laughs) That took me a while. Did you come up with that one yourself?
EC: No, I saw it on Tumblr in like 2000 something (laughs)
Context: This was recorded after I asked EC if she knew any good jokes.
Background: EC is a sophomore studying at the University of Southern California.
Analysis:I liked the interplay between the Internet and oral tradition. A lot of the time I think of how oral tradition is transferred to the Internet but not really about how it could go the other way. In this case, EC read a joke on the Internet and continued to spread it orally for years.