Tag Archives: Joke

Anti-Joke – Why was the little boy crying?

Nationality: Taiwanese American
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: Newport Beach, CA
Performance Date: April 8, 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Why was the little boy crying?
Because he had a frog stapled to his forehead.

My informant told me this joke after I had been venting about how bad my day had been.  At this point, she told me this joke.  After she delivered the punchline, I was at first taken aback by how violent the answer was. But then, I started to laugh at how far out and unexpected it was.  I asked her where she heard this joke, and she told me that she had heard it from school.

This joke is an example of an anti-joke.  An anti-joke is characterized by having the question be one that can have many different answers to it.  Another characteristic is that the punchline is usually not funny.  However, the unexpected nature of the punchline is really what makes the joke humorous.  This form of jokes probably developed as a way to add a twist to the stereotypical jokes that are out there.

Mood ring joke

Nationality: American
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: Lawrenceville, NJ
Performance Date: 4/22/12
Primary Language: English

The joke goes, “I just lost my mood ring. I don’t even know I feel about it.”

My informant heard it from his best friend and likes it because it reminds of that relationship, which he said is one based on humor. Their dynamic is always fun and things like puns and non sequiturs form a big part of it because they are often absurd and so a departure from the stressful real world. This joke is absurd, too. It’s funny because it implies that without a ring that is supposed to tell you your mood, you don’t know what your mood is or what your feelings are. It plays on the fact that mood rings don’t actually work and to know our feelings, we can simply ask ourselves how we feel. The joke makes the reverse seem true.

I think jokes like that, where we assert something absurd or untrue, are funny especially to the current generation because they’re a very self-aware form of humor (fits in with postmodernism). They don’t sound like typical jokes of the past, which are often very transparently jokes, but instead are just statements that we only know to be jokes because they are so untrue or absurd.

Knock knock boo who joke

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Writer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/23/12
Primary Language: English
Language: German

“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Boo.” “Boo who?”
“Don’t cry; it’s only a knock knock joke.”

A friend taught my informant this joke in elementary school. Like many knock knock jokes, it relies on using words with multiple meanings to give an unexpected punchline. And like some knock knock jokes, its annoying to the one hearing the joke, here because its suggested that they cry very easily (which could mean they are weak or oversensitive). My informant remembers disliking the joke for this reason, which is that it seems to trick the listener by taking their words to mean something they did not intend. My informant thinks it’s interesting because of this, though: because it shows that for some reason, there’s something people like about annoying others. They like pushing their buttons just to see what the reaction will be.

This is especially true in children I think, who want to see how people will react when they do something they suspect will annoy the person. Such a joke is also a form of teasing, which can make you feel above a person in a way. A child might want to feel that if they are insecure or just testing out social boundaries. Teasing, or jokes like this, can also be friendly, though, and used as a bonding event between people. Even though it’s at someone’s expense, it shows that the people involved are comfortable with each other and don’t mind making fun of one another.

Dead baby joke- porch

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/24/12
Primary Language: English

It’s a joke my informant heard in middle school from his brother.

“What’s the worst part about having sex with a dead baby on your porch?”

“Getting blood on your clown suit.”

My informant said dead baby jokes are interesting to him because they’re the epitome of macabre humor. They show how humor has evolved up to where it is now that these are the kinds of things people find funny. He says the jokes are primarily funny because of the shock value because the answers are so unexpected. He also commented that he thinks it’s interesting that the teller often seems to get more out of the joke in these cases because they will get to enjoy shocking someone, whereas with most jokes the audience gets more out of it.

I agree with his analysis. The last part is an especially novel point, and I think it’s true. The audience probably wants to be shocked, but the teller might find it more satisfying to be shocking, since society so often doesn’t want us to be. But in the context of a joke that we heard from someone else, and therefore which we aren’t responsible for, we can be as shocking as we want without guilt or shame.

Dead baby jokes show how we use humor to deal with the things we find most frightening or gruesome in life. These jokes take that to the most extreme point possible by taking the most vulnerable thing in society and subjecting it to the most horrible sexual and violent acts we can think of. Often people will be offended by the question of the joke, but the punchline usually takes it so much further (meaning, is even more offensive) that people can’t help but laugh, because that’s the only way they can deal with something that is so socially unacceptable and sounds so terrible. There are many dead baby jokes and they all seem to function in this way, pushing the limits of what is inappropriate so far and with such a level of self-awareness that they become funny.

Supplies Joke

Nationality: Chinese American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Cupertino, California
Performance Date: 04/21/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

There’s a German man, American man and a Chinese man who are all employees at a cement factory. When the employer comes along, he tells the German man to set the cement, he tells the American man to set the bricks, and he tells the Chinese man to get the supplies. When he comes back in an hour, the cement is all set and bricks are all in place, but the Chinese man is nowhere to be found. When he asks where the Chinese man is, the Chinese man jumps out of the bush and yells “supplies!”

The informant says she first heard this joke from a friend in high school when they were both on a trip. She says that although they are both Asian, they both found it extremely funny, because this joke plays upon stereotypes of accents that are often true within the older generation that came to America, not having grown up here. Although it is stereotypical, she believes that it is all in good fun.

It is interesting how this joke plays with the idea of Blason Populaire. The informant and the person whom she heard the joke from are both Asian Americans with parents who have accents that are similar to the one being made fun of in the joke. By laughing over the joke and taking the idea lightly, they are both identifying with a group, which reaffirms their identities as Asian Americans. Furthermore, this joke also uses the rule of 3, which indicates that it originated in Western culture.