Tag Archives: jokes

Los Melones de Tapachula

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 48
Occupation: Pediatric Oncologist
Residence: San Francisco, CA
Performance Date: March 15, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

My informant is a 48 year old pediatric oncologist at Stanford University. He is bilingual, binational and bicultural, born to a white American father and a Mexican mother. He grew up in both places but spent his formative adolescent years in Mexico City, where he learned this joke from a high school friend. He cracks up every time he performs this joke, which is often.

The joke in Spanish goes like this: “No es lo mismo los melones de Tapachula que tapate los melones chula.”

The literal translation is: “It’s not the same the melons of Tapachula as cover your melons cutie”.

This is a semi-dirty joke that employs wordplay, and is one of many “no es lo mismo” (“it’s not the same thing”) jokes. These jokes play with the sounds of a phrase and mix them up to make them something very different, as with this joke, which switches from the tame concept of melons from a certain town called Tapachula to a crude way of telling a attractive woman to cover up her breasts.

I love this piece and think it’s pretty funny, especially because the informant (my father) always laughs harder at it than anyone he tells it to. As a semi-dirty joke, it’s somewhat of a light taboo for him to break, especially in terms of telling this kind of joke in front of kids, so he gets a kick out of it every time he can perform it.

Accounting jokes

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 5/1/2014
Primary Language: English

18. Brooke Briody: Accounting jokes (5/1)

INFO:
There are 3 types of accountants. Those who can count and those who can’t.

How does Santa’s accountant value his sleigh? Net PRESENT value.

Where do homeless accountants live? In a tax shelter.

BACKGROUND:
The informant is going to be an accountant soon, but was told the story during a friend’s birthday party, when a random man at the party walked up to her group of friends and tried to chat them up with a series of cheesy accounting jokes, not realizing that she and many of her friends were accounting majors at USC.

CONTEXT:
The informant shared this with me in conversation.

ANALYSIS:
While these jokes are ostensibly for people in the accounting occupation, someone with a basic understanding of what the profession entails (dry, “nerdy”) can also hear these jokes and find them funny, not because they’re funny but because they’re so in line with popular perceptions of what accountant humor is like.

Soviet military joke

Nationality: Russian-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/18/2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Russian

INFO:
A Soviet soldier and an officer are chilling together at the base. The soldier goes to the officer and says, “Comrade/captain! Can you tell me why is your shirt red?” The captain says, “Well, comrade/private, if we go into battle and I’m shot, I don’t want you to know that I’m bleeding out and I want you to keep on fighting.” And the private goes, “Oh, okay, that makes so much sense! That must also be why your boxers are yellow.”

BACKGROUND:
He was told this joke by his Russian friend, about ten years ago. They were just talking about military stuff, maybe playing a video game together, when unprompted, the informant’s friend shared the joke. The informant still thinks the joke is funny, but

CONTEXT:
I spoke to my informant during an on-campus event.

ANALYSIS:
Clearly, there are some attitudes about the Soviet military, and perhaps the entire Soviet political structure, being expressed in this joke. It takes the idea of the “cowardly officer” but expresses it in the faux-egalitarian framework of the Communist regime. Even though I don’t completely understand the joke in and of itself, I can still feel the upwards-directed anger within the officer/private confrontation.

The Wonder That Is The English Language, or “Let Us Not Arg.”

Nationality: Indian
Age: 82
Occupation: Philosopher, Writer
Residence: Hyderabad, AP, India
Performance Date: 3/18/2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada

Item:

“Two gentlemen are at a museum of modern art, one Indian and one American, and they are both looking at a very strange and indeterminate painting, trying to figure out what it is all about. You know, what people do with art, especially with modern art. So the first man proclaims his opinion on the work – ‘This painting is very vayg-yoo.’ The second man, although agreeing completely, is supremely annoyed at the first man’s butchering of the word ‘vague’. He attempts to clarify – ‘Look here, sir, in English, we do not pronounce the ue at the end.’ The first man nods, understanding, and benignly responds – ‘All right, all right, friend. Let us not arg.'”

Context:

The informant actually came up with this joke due to his fascination with the English language and its janky mechanics – “I came up with this joke after watching the film Chupke Chupke, which is, essentially, a questioning of the jhameli (ruckus) that is the English language. In the film, there is a line that perfectly sums up my fascination and confusion with this language – ‘Agar T-O “too” hai, aur D-O “doo”, toh phir G-O “go” kaise hua?’ (If T-O is pronounced ‘too” and D-O is pronounced “doo”, then how does G-O become “go”?) And so various other confusions came to my mind, namely the selective silencing of certain syllables. I thought this little anecdote was in perfect conjunction with this question from the film.”

Analysis:

English is a very weird language. It takes elements of every language by which it has been influenced and scrambles them up into an interesting but utterly confusing potpourri. The informant’s joke is, therefore, the perfect exploration and depiction of the non-native English speaker’s constant battle with the odd language. In India, especially, where Hindi is the most widely-spoken language, every syllable of every word is pronounced exactly as it is written in the native scripts. Therefore, when confronted with a word like “vague”, one can understand the confusion of the Indian man at the silencing of the last part of the word. Also, in a country where the rules of languages are fairly constant, one can also sympathize when the man does not understand that the rule of dropping the “ue” does not extend to every single word, and is instead a case-by-case situation. Interestingly, this joke gently pokes fun at the strange formulations of the English language while also not sparing the Indian man’s ignorance of pronunciation.

The Drowning Man’s Appeal

Item:

“A Hindu man is in a rowboat in a particularly stormy section of the river. All of a sudden, his boat rams into a boulder, and he goes flying into the icy water. The rapids are carrying him away, and so he holds onto a small fragment of the wooden boat, trying to stay afloat. This doesn’t help him for very long. Just as he’s about to drown, therefore, he has the brilliant idea to pray to Ganesha, the deity of overcoming challenges and obstacles. Ganesha appears before him, and asks him what he wants. The man tearfully begs the elephant-headed god to get him out of the water, to which Ganesha replies – ‘Hah! You drown me every year, without even asking me what I want, and then when you’re drowning, you expect me to help you out of the water? Yeah, right!'”

Context:

The informant, a devout Hindu and an avid joke-teller, related the history of this joke – “This is one of the most hilarious jokes I have ever heard. A lot of Hindus know the joke, and know the significance of the joke. It’s funny because it puts the festival and rituals of Ganesh Chaturti into the perspective of the god himself, turning the joke around on us and making us wonder what the gods actually think of what we do to them.”

Analysis:

This joke mocks the rituals of Ganesh Chaturti, a traditional Hindu festival in which earthen idols of Ganesha are immersed in the nearest holy river or lake, symbolizing his return to his mother, the goddess of the earth Bhumi Devi, amid a spectacular celebration. It personifies the idol of the young, elephant-headed god, and switches the positions of the drowner and the drownee, putting Ganesh in the position of power here. In addition to this, the god is portrayed hilariously immature and vindictive, diminishing his deified dignity and showing him to be actually disgruntled by the rituals of a festival which celebrates his birth and ascent to heaven, a situation which people don’t really consider when performing these grand and honorific traditions.