Tag Archives: Joke

A Joke with no Punchline

Nationality: American
Age: 23
Occupation: Investment Banker
Residence: Manhattan, New York
Performance Date: 4/6/2017
Primary Language: English

 

Informant:

Daniel is a first year analyst at a prominent Manhattan based investment bank. He grew up in Northern California from a predominantly irish background

Piece:

The first party I ever went to was kinda a bummer. I was invited the day of and was stressed cause I had nothing to wear. So I went to the mall and picked out a shirt and waited in the checkout line. But then I was hungry so I went to wetzel’s Pretzels and waited in the pretzel line. And then later that night I showed up and waited in the party line to get in. And then when I finally got I went to get a drink but there was no punchline.

Collector’s thought’s:

This joke takes a while to develop and is paradoxical in nature. The first person aspect of it makes it so that the audience can not tell that it is a joke and not real until the repetition of waiting in lines kicks in. Part of what makes this joke funny is that the punchline of the joke is literally that “there was no punchline”, a paradox that is equally infuriating and hilarious.

Dentist Joke

Nationality: Irish American
Age: 57
Occupation: Dentist
Residence: San Carlos, Ca
Performance Date: 4/6/2017
Primary Language: English

Informant:

Terry is a second generation Irish american who grew up in los Angeles in the ‘60s and 70’s. He is now a dentist working and living in the Bay area.

Piece:

Ok, so here is a joke that I learned in dental school. It goes like this:

What did the dentist see in the North pole?

A molar bear

Collector’s thoughts:

This short dentist joke is a pun which replaces polar bear with the word molar. The informant laughed at his own joke and got great pleasure from telling it. To me it seemed that half of the fun in telling this joke for the informant came from the fact that it is a somewhat boring joke.

(Najkraci vic na svijetu) the shortest joke in the world

Nationality: Croatian, American
Age: 49
Occupation: water pol referee
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/19/2017
Primary Language: Croatian
Language: English

TK is my dad and he likes jokes. It was a part of his culture growing up and he always likes to have a nice laugh.

 

Every summer we my family and I would go to Iž for our vacation. Iž is an island in Croatia. Usually to pass time in the car on our way there we play games, tell jokes and on one of those rides he told us this one.

 

TK: do you want to hear the shortest joke in the world?

 

Me: Yes

 

TK: do you want to hear another one?

 

He heard this joke from his friend back when he was in high school. The genre of jokes he enjoys is simple, short and stupid just like this one above. For those exact reasons these kind oh jokes are funny. A joke like this one is meant to bring giggles and not full on laughter. They are usually used to pass time, in between classes, on road trips and etc.

Two men filing a missing report

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles,CA
Performance Date: 3/17/2017
Primary Language: English

Informant: TF was born and raised in Villa Park, California. His father works in commercial real estate and his mother working as a manager for Choc Hospital. He has one older brother, a twin sister, and one younger brother. TF is half Lebanese and strongly connected to his Lebanese background. He is a first year student at USC. TF heard this joke from his friend back in high school. TF told me this joke last semester while studying for one of our finals.

 

“A husband came to the police station to report that his wife is missing. There was one man already there filing the papers for his missing wife Katarina. The police officer asked what Katarina looks like; the husband says: “long legs, blonde, big breasts…”

The police officer turns back to the other husband and asks: “and your wife sir.”

“Forget my wife, lets find Katarina.”’

 

The joke makes fun of men; as soon as they see an attractive woman they go running after her. Not thinking with their heads, but instead with their penises. The joke is exaggerating that men are only interested in the superficial. This is why it is funny, because if we generalize men, it is true to an extant.

Vermont Accents

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 01/15/17
Primary Language: English

This is a description of the Vermont/Milton accent that is used in Northern Vermont. The informant is from Burlington, which is one of the larger cities in Vermont and the most metropolitan.

“Um so, people in vermont, its actually a very interesting socio-economic uh little raft, because it’s a lot of very old farming families that have been there forever, so a lot of french-candadian and irish old old old families, that like, live there, and then in 60s and 70s a lot of communes popped up, and so theres was like a lot of college educated upper middle class wealthy people who moved to vermont, and so theres kind of a lot of class divisions and dynamics working out there. Um, and it kind of, there’s a division between people who have the accent and those that don’t, and the further isolated you get, the thicker the accent is, and the most isolated is in the islands of vermont, um, and that’s Milton, but if you live there is “Mil’un”, because you don’t say the T and you really hit the vowels, um, so we make, they are the butt of everyone’s jokes, the people up in the boonies,  up in the fucking islands, who like cannot speak a word of english and you can’t understand it, um, they’re seen as the dumbest hillbillies and just the like biggest idiots in all of vermont and there’s a lot of big idiots in vermont, um, and they, people do their accents, so I don’t have an accent because my parents are from upstate new york and i have a very upstate new york accent but the vermont accent is a lot of dropped T’s, Vermon’”

 

Analysis: When speaking about Vermont, it was clear that informant knew a lot about how the differences in class affect how vernacular speech is disseminated between communities. She was aware that living where she did and having the parents that she did created a difference between her and the other Vermonters who had been there for generations. She was also able to perform the accent although she doesn’t speak with it.