You Don't Get The Joke (Probably)

You might think you have a totally normal sense of humor, but then you hear a joke from the past and it sounds like it came from some other dimension. That's when you realize once again that your normal can be another person's weird.

Join your new favorite podcaster-historian host on this journey through space and time, and open your mind to myriad manners of mirth-making. Along the way, you'll meet some fancy-pants anthropologists, a hungry international traveler, a possibly crazy dude from Kansas, some talking animals, a U.S. Senator, and a gassy Sumerian, among many others.

You'll also find out far more about lusty sea creatures than you'd ever thought possible from a history podcast.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

TRANSCRIPT

YAAW Podcast | Episode 2 | Doug Sofer

Pilot: You Don’t Get the Joke

©2022 Doug Sofer

Intro

•   [Theme music vamp]

•   Welcome back to another sparkly new episode of this podcast about how history helps us to unlock the Strangeness of Now.

•   [pause]

•   Hey, I’ve got joke for you.

•   It’s in the form of a dialogue between Stella and Bella 

•   Stella [asks]: “Has she a Southern accent?”

•   Bella [replies]: “Yes. She can't get enough R's in a month to eat oysters.”

•   [Forced laugh, lingering for just a second or two longer than it should.]

•   Hoo yeah, that’s great stuff.

•   Except I didn’t get it at first.

•   And if you’re like most people today, you didn’t get it either.

•   That’s because Stella and Bella’s little jocular exchange is from a joke book first published all the way back in 1908.

•   [It’s called Caricature: The Wit & Humor of a Nation in Picture, Song & Story...]

•   So now imagine you’re at a little party from that year, surrounded by folks who are laughing riotously at that joke, while you just don’t get it.

•   You sit there, forcing an awkward smile, praying that nobody asks you to explain what on earth shellfish has to do with Dixie dialects.

•   Yes, an experience like that can make you feel out of your element—perhaps even [pause] like some kind of weirdo.

•   [pause]

•   Well I have great news: You will be able to snicker knowingly at this and other chucklesome jests from yesterday, once you join me today on a journey through time.

•   [pause]

•   Sure, this experience could be difficult; cackling crowds of dead people are almost always a little unsettling.

•   [THEME BUILD]

•   But don’t worry; I’m here to help you on your voyage into grasping the completely normal humor of the past. After all, I’m a professional historian and I’m trained to assist people in situations just like yours.

•   My name is Doug Sofer. And I’m a weirdo just like you. 

•   [THEME]

•   [SPONSORSHIP BLURB]

Culture

•   Sometimes a joke just flies over your head and it makes you feel awkward. 

•   Well it turns out that You Are a Weirdo…

•   [Divebomb]

•   is the name of this podcast, so you’ve come to the right place. Today’s episode is called “You Don’t Get The Joke—Probably”

•   There could be many reasons why you don’t understand something that others think is funny:

•   A joke just might not appeal to your personal sense of humor. Perhaps there are too many fart jokes to suit your taste.

•   Conversely, there may not be enough flatulence humor to your liking.

•   Or maybe you once worked on a highway cleanup crew next to a poultry farm with a poorly constructed fence, so that today even the mere suggestion of flightless fowl traversing the street fills you with an overpowering sense of despair.

•   [pause]

•   But one reason that you might not get a joke is that you don’t come from the same society out of which a particular joke was born.

•   The fact is that some jokes are more dependent on where and when they’re from than others.

•   Some kinds of comedy seem designed to be gotten by pretty much everyone. 

•   Fart jokes, sex jokes, toilet humor and physical comedy of many varieties seem to have universal human elements to them.

•   Even if you personally don’t find them funny, you should at least be able to understand their punchlines easily, regardless of who you are.

•   But other attempts at humor just won’t make sense unless you know something about the cultural context out of which they were created.

•    

•   That word culture can mean a bunch of different things, so let’s define it in the fancy-pants academic way that we’re using it here.

•   Ready? Here we go:

•   [very slowly] Culture refers to the symbolic connections that you have ready-to-go in your mind at pretty much all times, that help you make sense of the world, that help you create a sense of belonging, and that help bring meaning to your life.

•   [pause]

•   Yes, that was absolutely the shortest, simplest definition I could come up with.

•   Culture in this sense is the stomping ground of a jaunty group of scholars called cultural anthropologists. And if you’ve ever read any cultural anthropology, you already know that one-sentence, jargon-free definitions can be rare in their world.

•   In fact, many cultural anthropologists will tell you that culture is so complicated and so nuanced and so hard to get a handle on that they don’t want to define it as a single thing at all.

•   We pro historians love our anthropology colleagues and we borrow a lot from them these days.

•   But for the purposes of today’s episode, and since we want to get back to the main topic at some point in the next ten hours, that definition I just offered will have to do.

•   In fact, you’ll probably want to hear it again. Since you might be driving or washing dishes now, I’ll repeat it—that way you don’t have to take your hands away from the steering wheel or get soapy water all over your phone to replay it:

•   [slowly again] Culture refers to the symbolic connections that you have ready-to-go in your mind at pretty much all times, that help you make sense of the world, that help you create a sense of belonging, and that help bring meaning to your life.

•   [pause]

•   That’s our working definition. Here are some examples of how the concept of culture works in practice:

•   If you grew up in the U.S. and you happen to see, for example, a shamrock next to a mug of green beer, you’ll immediately associate those symbols with a certain celebration at a certain time of year—St. Patrick’s Day on March 17.

•   A drawing of a bald eagle or of a man with a goatee and a red-white--and-blue-striped hat will instantly stir associations with the USA. It might also conjure up feelings of patriotism and/or a sense of being American.

•   Seeing a person in a black robe and holding a wooden gavel will instantly produce the word judge in your head.

•   Those are examples of symbols you can see, but sight is not the only sense through which we make these instant connections.

•   Hearing the first six notes of the Star Spangled Banner [play melody with over bass part with midi brass] might stir instant feelings of patriotism, or make you think of Independence Day.

•   You might also now have a bunch of words in your head now—something about the dawn’s early light, rockets’ red glare and so forth.

•   Smells too can be especially powerful; the aroma of a roasting turkey can evoke a whole host of associations with Thanksgiving.

•   And the taste of a hotdog might bring to mind your childhood visits to a ballpark, or make you think of summer.

•   All of these are examples of the kinds of connections that you make immediately—usually without thinking at all.

•   [Pause]

•   Some of these associations may be specific to you as an individual.

•   But these examples are also dependent on different cultural contexts—that is, [slowly] different sets of symbols that you share with specific groups of people from specific places.

•   Some things that mean a great deal to you and people like you, might not mean the same thing—or even much of anything—to others.

•   For instance, running into someone wearing an enormous foam piece of Swiss cheese on their head will only make sense if you understand something about professional football in Wisconsin.

•   And if you’re from, say, Minnesota, it might make you angry.

•   Or if a blue-clad stranger moseys up to you and chants the curious phrase “Rock Chalk Jayhawk—KU”—how you respond will depend on many different factors. For example:

•   If you are a fan of the University of Kansas, you’ll probably be pleased to hear this fellow Jayhawk reciting this mantra; you’ll identify this person as a kindred spirit.

•   But if you happen to be wearing a Kansas State Wildcats baseball cap, you will likely take that otherwise innocuous geological reference to a variety of limestone—as fightin’ words.

•   Finally, if you don’t follow college sports in the U.S. Midwest at all, you will likely think that this chanting dude with a cartoon bird on his shirt has gone completely bonkers.

•   In each of those different cultural contexts, the same exact chant will have different meanings.

•   [pause]

•   In fact, cultural contexts can make or break a joke too.

•   Here’s a joke I found on the Web that illustrates the point. The setup is that it’s from a long list of Bogan Etiquette and it includes the advice that “It’s tacky to take an Esky to Church.” [https://netrider.net.au/threads/bogan-jokes.149331/]

•   [pause]

•   This joke only makes sense if you know something about Australian popular culture and know what a bogan is, what an Esky is.

•   For the record, a Bogan [BO-gənn] refers to an allegedly uncouth, uneducated Aussie. An Esky is a portable ice cooler; the implication is that neither beer nor bait are appropriate things to take with you to church and that bogans need to be taught this fact.

•   [pause]

•   If that joke was confusing, then, it’s because you’re from somewhere outside Australia, or haven’t yet taken an Aussie English 101 class or equivalent.

•   On the other hand, once you understand the vocabulary difference, there’s probably something that feels familiar to you about that joke.

•   In the U.S.A., there are similar pejorative terms to describe uncultured populations. You could easily make an equivalent gag about unrefined folks bringing comparably inappropriate stuff to a religious service.

•   [pause]

•   But other kinds of jokes don’t translate as easily across different cultures. That’s because language itself is an element of cultural context; it’s like a shared library of symbolic associations; words symbolize things.

•    

•   So for example, when I lived in the country of Colombia, I heard this Spanish-language joke.

•   A Paisa—a person from the Colombian region called Antioquia—was going to travel to the U.S. but didn’t speak any English. He asked his friend how he could order food in an English-speaking restaurant.

•   His friend told him he could easily order steak and eggs by saying the Spanish sentence “¿Usted, quién es?”; he said it would sound like Steak and Eggs to an English speaker. 

•   The guy got to the US, sat down in a diner, and confidently said to the waiter “¿Vos, quién sos?”

•   [long pause]

•   To understand that joke, you need to realize that ¿Usted quién es? And ¿Vos quién sos?” both mean Who are you? But that people from Antioquia characteristically use the vos form instead of Usted.

•   So, was that translatable? Sure—sort of—once you get the language parts. 

•   But is it still funny to people who have no prior knowledge of not only Spanish but also of Colombia’s regional language differences?

•   You tell me.

•   My guess is probably not if it requires that much explanation.

•   The success of the joke hinges entirely on having prior inside knowledge about Colombia and its peoples.

•   Once again, it’s about understanding contexts.

•   [Transition music]

Temporal contexts

•   But being from different place is not the only way to be a cultural outsider.

•   Cultural contexts also change over time.

•   For example, here’s an excerpt from a publication called The American Magazine of Wit—that’s actually more of a book than a magazine—that was published in 1808:

•   “A gentleman in Philadelphia, wishing to ridicule Peter Porcupine, went to his store, and enquired whether he had Porcupine's quills for sale[.]

•   “The British wag replied in the affirmative, took from his shelf a bundle of common writing quills, and tendered them to the gentleman.

•   “The would-be wit immediately took the quills and paid for them; then archly looking at Peter, inquired again whether they were Porcupine’s quills?

•   “’O no,’ replied Cobbet, ‘They were indeed so once, but they are goose-quills now.’”

•   [long pause]

•   The gist of the joke makes sense if you know that people used to write with goose quill feathers, and that a goose is also an insult meaning a fool or simpleton.

•   It makes much more sense if you happen to know that Peter Porcupine was a nickname for a British political author named William Cobbett who lived 1763–1835 and who lived on and off in the U.S. for three decades.

•   So the quills used to be porcupine’s quills when they belonged to Peter Porcupine, but now that they belong to this gentleman, they’re gooses’ quills.

•   The author of this vignette assumed that readers of his time and place would just know all of these facts.

•   [pause]

•   Now here’s a joke that’s distant in both time and space—unless you happen to be listening to this podcast in China—in 1907.

•   The joke is cited in a recent book by the historian Christopher Rea. It’s a poop joke so if you happen to be eating right now, you might want to pause the podcast until you’ve finished.

•    The express version goes that a white dog falls into a cesspit—a hole full of raw sewage—and gets covered in yellow-brownish feces.

•   When the mutt jumps out and happily trots off into a marketplace, everyone runs away and keeps their distance, at which point the dog reflects to himself:

•   “It’s true—those of renown dazzle the low-born! Today, seeing me wearing the Yellow Jacket, these peasants are all intimidated.”

•   [pause]

•   Maybe a poo-covered dog who thinks to himself in English—actually Chinese—is funny on its own—but the joke only really makes sense when you realize that imperial officials in the late Qing Dynasty of China wore gold-colored robes.

•   The Qing Dynasty would be overthrown just four years later, so maybe it’s not surprising that satirists were pooh-poohing the trappings of authority at this point in time.

•   So if you get the context, you realize that this story is irreverent.

•   If you don’t understand what’s going on in China at this point, it’s just a disgusting story about people fleeing from a talking dog covered in human waste.

•   [pause]

•   And speaking of potty humor, some old jokes don’t require much explanation at all, at least once they’re translated.

•   For instance, one old saying—which Reuters news agency alleges is likely the oldest known joke on earth, dates all the way back to 1900 BCE or BC.

•   It’s from Sumer in the southern part of Mesopotamia—more-or-less modern Iraq. The saying goes: 

•   “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

•   [pause]

•   I told you that fart jokes were universal.

•   In that sense, some historical jokes don’t make you feel weird at all.

•   I know that’s contrary to the whole point of this podcast, but real historians don’t overstate our cases when the evidence doesn’t bear it out.

•   [Aside] For the record, the weirdo-theme is just a way to get you to realize how much you love real history—you know, sort of like how Conan O’Brian doesn’t really need all those new friends but that’s the name of his show….

•   Then again, this next quip from a 1703 London joke book doesn’t survive to the present-day as well as the Sumerian fart joke from 3,000 years earlier did. It goes:

•   “One said, of a tallow chandler that died, ‘Twas strange that he who made so many Weeks, could make his days no longer.”

•   Get it? [Pause]

•   Maybe not? [Pause]

•   I only figured this one out when I realized that “week” must have been how the modern word “wick” was spelled or pronounced. I confirmed this in a 1708 dictionary.

•   In this case, the language itself changed over time—fairly subtly in this joke.

•    And understanding that languages and other facets of cultural context both change through history is the key to understanding many seemingly inscrutable jokes from the past.

•   So finally at long last, we can return to our original joke—about the Southerner who didn’t have enough Rs in a month to eat oysters.

•   [pause] [separator music]

Getting the joke

•   Up to this point, we’ve talked a lot about language. We’ve looked at words, many of which might be new to you—like bogan and Paisa and rock-chalk.

•   And you’ve picked up historical double meanings for other words—like goose and week.

•   Even so, a language is more than just a catalogue of words.

•   The way that we pronounce particular words varies too, even within the same language. This is where accents come into play.

•   Most of us humans are good at identifying when an accent is different from our own.

•   We notice that someone’s making slightly different mouth sounds, and we figure out that someone’s from somewhere else—from ain’t ‘round here.

•   In other words, we can tell when someone learned to speak within a different cultural context—where people use different mouth-sound-symbols.

•   And our opening joke clearly has something to do with regional accents—that come from a different cultural context than wherever the joke-tellers—Stella and Bella—are from.

•   But what’s especially cool about this joke, at least for historians, is that it’s not only about an accent from a different point in space—it’s also about one from a different point in time.

•   The reason the joke initially confused the heck out of me—is that the southern accent described is not one I immediately recognized.

•   I’ve lived for many decades in the U.S. South—Tennessee, Georgia and Texas—and I’ve heard many Southern accents from many different regions—and I wasn’t familiar with any that left out the letter R.

•   For an exaggerated example, when Larry the Cable Guy plays a tow truck in the Disney Pixar film Cars, he has no problem pronouncing the ‘R’ at the end of his character’s name—'Mater.

•   [pause]

•   Luckily, I happened to have done some top-notch historical accent research—By accident. When I was a little kid.

•   It came through watching a lot of Looney Toons cartoons, re-run from the 1940s–60s. If you’ve ever heard the cartoon rooster named Foghorn Leghorn talk, he says things like the following line of dialogue—spoken immediately after exploding.

•   “Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered, for just such an emergency.”

•   You can hear how most of the R’s in his words turn into AWs and UHs like in FAWtunately, Feath-UHs, Numb-UH’d and Em-UH-gency.

•   If there’s ever a Looney-Toons-and Cars movie mashup, Foghorn will pronounce the tow truck’s name as “May-TUH.”

•   [pause]

•   All right, I know I’m no Mel Blanc—but hopefully you get the gist.

•   Speaking of actual professional voice actors, Mr. Leghorn’s accent was based on a character developed for Fred Allen’s radio show from the 1930s and forties named Senator Beauregard Claghorn. He said things like this:

•   [Clip from Break The Continent Episode—ca. 5:30]

•   “Let’s go son; I’m busier than a man with one tooth eatin’ corn on the cob.”

•   Again: Bizze-ah for busier; Cawn—instead of corn—both missing their ‘R’ sounds.

•   Or this one:

•   “Yaw tongue’s waggin’ like a blind dawg’s tail in a meat mawket.”

•   Yaw for Your; Mawket for market.

•   The actor who developed the character of senator Claghorn was Allen’s announcer, Kenny Delmar. Delmar based this character’s accent on actual people, whom he’d actually met, who actually spoke that way, throughout the actual Southern United States, during Delmar’s actual lifetime of 1910 to 1984.

•   An accent that drops R-sounds is called a non-rhotic dialect. You can save a couple of syllables and impress people at fancy parties with raw oyster bars by saying rhotic instead of “pronounces Rs,” which means the same thing.

•   The non-rhotic dialect seems to have been more of an upper-crust Southern accent—the kind that a senator would have. It’s become less common over the past half-century or so.

•   But the lack of R’s seems to have once been a distinguishing feature of many Southern accents—especially from the Deep South—until fairly recently.

•   A friend of mine from the great Southern state of Mississippi—who’s also a psychologist of language—tells me that he knows old timers who still speak some variation on this accent.

•   [long pause]

•   So hey—good news! We’ve solved part one of the joke:

•   The Southern woman mentioned does not pronounce her R-sounds because in 1908 she speaks in a more classical Southern accent that today is less commonly spoken. Anyone reading that joke in 1908 would understand that Southerners don’t pronounce their Rs.

•   That accent—and that knowledge of the accent—was part of the cultural context of the USA in 1908.

•   [long pause]

•   Fine, but what in the Fogging Claghorns does speaking without ‘R’s have to do with oysters?

•   I thought at first it was some kind of pun—I tried saying oyster in Foghorn Leghorn’s accent: Oy-STUH oy-STUH oy-STUH. No, that doesn’t really mean anything.

•   Or maybe Rs pronounced as “AHs” meant something. One friend thought it might have to do with a genteel Southerner saying “Hours” in a month—“Owahs, Ahhs, Oahaws…”

•   Do any of those theories work? No.

•   I realized I needed the help of a pre-Gen Xer. So I called my mom.

•   She didn’t get the Southern accent part at all—which by that point I had already solved—but then she casually mentioned:

•   “Well of course, people say you should never eat oysters during a month that has the letter ‘R’ in it.”

•   Wait what? That was obviously the key, but I’d never heard the expression before. If it’s new to you too, here’s how it works:

•   The non-R months are May, June, July, August—the summer months.

•   I went online to explore and found a recent Southern Living magazine article, and a report of a very cool recent research project from the University of Florida’s museum. 

•   Both say that conventional wisdom holds that you should never eat oysters during the summer months.

•   Why not? Three good reasons:

•   First, they don’t taste good;

•   Second, you might just kill off all the future generations of oysters;

•   Third, they might give you food poisoning.

•   The third problem seems the most obvious one.

•   Prior to modern refrigeration, it was harder to keep oysters cold, which could lead to some of them dying, spoiling or picking up nasty diseases.

•   Have you ever seen an oyster cough? Me neither, but I still know it’s not pretty.

•   Sustainability is probably the important factor in the long run. Wild oysters spawn in the Summer, which means that eating the mollusks prevents their populations from recovering. A lone oyster will—and I’m quoting from a scientific source here—“release his gonad,” firing his sperm into the water. 

•   Other males when detecting the sperm will immediately join in and release their gonads too. At that point the females will shoot their eggs out.

•   Sperm and egg meet up in the water and before you know it you’ve got a sexy floating oyster party that eventually leads to a bunch of baby oysters.

•   During these critical months, oysters are very interested in doing only that—creating the next generations of oysters. A side-effect is that they become less interested in being delicious.

•   During spawning time, oysters become scrawnier, chewier, and taste weirder than during colder months. And eating them while they taste bad also means that there won’t be as many new ones to eat in the Fall.

•   Now that we understand it, here’s the new version of the joke

•   Stella: Has she a Southern accent?”

•   Bella: Yes indeed! In fact, her high-class, non-rhotic dialect of the Southern accent means that she cannot pronounce the letter ‘R’, and thus she can only accurately pronounce the names of summer months during which oysters release their gonads and squirt out various reproductive substances at one another, thereby making them taste funky.

•   [pause]

•   Hmm. Yeah, I guess the original punchline flows a little better than mine. 

•   [long pause again]

•   [separator music]

--End Reorg’d section

•   Well it looks like we’ve solved our mystery.

•   Along the way, we got to talk about culture. And Cheeseheads. And Bogans.

•   And elementary Spanish sentences like ¿Usted Quién es?—[close] I’m not really sure that sounds much like “Steak and Eggs.” What do you think?

•   We talked about poop-encrusted canines—and what they have to do with the fall of the Qing Dynasty in China.

•   We explored archaic meanings of words and tall, anthropomorphic poultry with gentrified Southern accents.

•   And all of those great conversations came from the simple process of just trying to understand a century-old joke.

•   [pause]

•   I think we have to call that a complete episode.

•   [pause]

•   Before we go, though, I wonder if Senator Claghorn has any final insights into the fascinating world of shellfish reproduction.

•   [Claghorn quote about clam production bill in Senate]

•   Thank you Senator, Mr. Allen. And thank you all too.

•   [outro vamp begins]

•   You’ve been a wonderful audience. Good night everybody.

Teaser                            

•   Our next episode is called [pause—whisper close to mic] You Hear Dead People.

•   [pause]

•   One of the weirdest things that We People of Now do on a daily basis is listen to the actual recorded voices, footsteps, handclaps, elbow-bumps, and face-smacks of people who are no longer alive on planet earth. We can even hear the unliving play instruments and sing.

•   In the big picture of human existence, recorded sound is new.

•   And it changes all of us in profound ways. Tune in next time to learn more.

Outgoing credits

•   [Vamp]

•   You can find references to the historical sources, audio clips, and information about bivalve mollusk physiology used for this episode at findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   Special thanks to Phil Sherman, Matt Trimboli, and Chad Schrock for assistance with and feedback on various different pieces of this episode.

•   This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2022 Doug Sofer. The theme song was also written by Doug Sofer and performed by Doug Sofer on lead guitar and bass with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

•   Thanks for listening.

•   [Theme song. 45 seconds. Fade out.]