Tag Archives: Joke

Musical Joke

Nationality: American
Age: 17
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Albuquerque, NM
Performance Date: 3/10/2013
Primary Language: English

Q: What’s the difference between a piano and a fish?

A: You can’t tuna(tune a) fish.

The informant recently learned the joke from one of the kids from the musical that she was in.  The joke teller plays piano and is very musical.  The informant found the joke amusing at first, but she said that as he kept telling it over and over it became annoying.  She had heard the joke recently, but she enjoyed telling me about the teller of the joke more than the joke itself.  The boy telling the joke was one of the younger members of the cast, and the informant assumes that he was trying to become part of the group though he was trying a little too hard.  I think the joke is more cute than funny, and mostly because of the description of the boy that went along with it.

Annotation: The National Aquarium in DC collected jokes about fish and this one was listed on their website:

“Fun Fish Jokes from the National Aquarium’s Facebook Fans.” National Aquarium WATERblog. National Aquarium, 11 July 2011. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. <http://nationalaquarium.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/fun-fish-jokes-from-the-national-aquariums-facebook-fans/>.

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.

Mexican Joke

Nationality: Korean
Age: 23
Occupation: Marketing
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: March 24, 2013
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: Korean, English

“Why don’t Mexicans do well in the Olympics? Because all the ones who know how to swim, run, and jump crossed the border.”

She elaborated on the joke when I did not quite understand it, that it means, the people who know how to be athletic, used these abilities to cross into the United States. My informant stated that her friends all seem to have differing opinions of the people that crossed the border. Some wished to also cross and believed that living in the States would help them solve their problems and open up more opportunities, while others had a more cynical view and looked down upon those who crossed into the States. They almost viewed these people as disloyal, and projected thoughts that their life would not be much better in the States.

I found it interesting that Mexicans told jokes about fellow Mexicans. I had not known that such a genre even existed. I imagine that people would have mixed feelings about border crossing and living as illegal immigrants, but also needing to earn more money to support themselves and their families, and feeling the lure of dreams of opportunity in the States. I guess it is similar to how Koreans living in South Korea have jokes about Korean-Americans, and vice versa. They are still technically similar, but being in different surroundings and experiencing different lifestyles may cause them to feel unrelated.

 

Joke: Theather humor

Nationality: American-White
Age: 25
Occupation: Lab Administrator/ researcher
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 18 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Intermediate French

Joke

“What has two legs, a tail, and bleeds profusely?”

“Half a cat.”

My informant got this joke in high school. It was everyone’s favorite joke in her Theater class. Sometimes they would just text each other “Half a cat”. The informant says that she thought it was funny in an unexpected and twisted way.  It was mostly funny because it was an inside joke within the theater group. She said it in-jokes were in common in her theater class, they wouldn’t make sense to people outside the class.

This is kind of a joke riddle. The humor comes from the fact that the person thinks the answer is going to something they don’t know but then the answer is actually really simple. It actually reminds me of a joke from one of my favorite books How NOT to write a Novel “Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess ” (Mittelmark and Newman) Apparently in American society dead cats are a source of humor.