Musings from Brian J. Noggle

With a title like Ozark Mountain Humor and a subtitle of Jokes on Hunting, Religion, Marriage & Ozark Ways, you might think that this is a humor or joke book. As I did. But, ah, my foes, and, ah, my friends, it is an academic study of jokes as folklore.

Which means that half of the book is end notes describing where the joke was “collected” (via field work, where intense academic types transcribed jokes). Each joke is numbered for easy reference, and each joke is called a “text” when described in the end notes. Motifs, numbered academically according to one or more humor motif codexes, are cross-referenced, and some of the jokes are delineated from humor manuscripts in 15th century Renaissance Italy or old English joke books printed immediately after the Gutenberg Bible.

And one or two of the jokes are funny.

But reading an academic book about jokes that includes jokes adds a bit of remove from the actual jokes, so perhaps I was less prepared to laugh. Also, I don’t tend to laugh at many jokes in these books, and I’m infrequently actually amused.

Here are the notes that I flagged in the book as I was reading:

• One joke deals with a young girl saying her prayers prior to moving to St. Louis, and she says at the end of her prayer, “This is goodbye, God. We’re moving to St. Louis.” (Text 117.) Even though I was a longtime resident of the St. Louis area, it was a bit reluctantly, so I can empathize.
• One joke (Text 126) deals with a barber whose shop is visited by a notorious outlaw; this reminded me of a shorter version of “Lather and Nothing Else” albeit with a punchline instead of a moral lesson.
• Texts 202b and 204a/204b look to be the source material for the Ray Stevens song “Sitting Up with the Dead”:

I didn’t flag the footnote that jokes about black people were removed at the publisher’s request. The jokes about nuns enjoying being raped, however, remained in the book. In 1989, our official sensibilities were only starting to be refined. Although one of the nuns being raped jokes relied on the inclusion of a black nun who speaks with a hyperbolic accent and who already knows a thing or two about sex. One wonders if this text was excised in later editions of the book.

Also, the author refers numerous times to Asimov’s Treasury of Humor (which I don’t think I own, but I will be on the lookout for), but never refers to Lecherous Limericks. Limericks are not part of the native Ozarks oral tradition, apparently.

At any rate: I read it, and it counts as my 75th book of the year. I even read the End Notes, or skimmed them, anyway, as some of them detailed the local people who told the joke, including many people who were born in the 19th century and saw the early 20th century changes to their corner of America.

The title of this book might fit onto one of the men’s adventure paperbacks I favor or perhaps one of the series Westerns I infrequently indulge in, but instead it is a collection of reminisciences published in the 1940s or 1950s from a man born in 1875 and a graduate of the Washington University School of Dentistry in 1904. So maybe the book is from the 1960s or 1970s, but most of the stories within it come from the late part of the ninteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries.

The book doesn’t move in chronological order, so we get stories of his growing up on a farm following stories of him working for the streetcar line while going to dentistry school. In addition to the memoirs, we get some natural science musings as he talks about different animals he’s seen and killed as well as health musings, including a chapter on constipation that leads to some, erm, novel remedies (and, after bladder trouble, he mentions that he doesn’t drink much water, so 100 years later, we can probably give him a better solution than the ones he recommends).

It’s a bit like listening to an older relative tell stories. I enjoyed it because I like these sorts of books, as you know, where real people put together their recollections and diaries and describe their world more plainly and accurately than historians or historical filmmakers can. What’s most striking about his life is not so much the hunting and fishing stories, but the times he talks about casual brawling with his associates and friends. They’d just start fighting for fun, and Dr. Traw had a long memory for men who whopped him, and he’d just sometimes get them back by starting to throw punches. As an adult. Maybe radio killed this pastime for rural America for the most part.

One thing I’d like to note is that this book ostensibly takes place 40 years or so before E.M. Bray’s Growing Up In The Bend, but how remarkably similar the lives were in the use of farm machinery, wagons, and rural life. It really illustrates how disruptive and changing the 20th century was. So far into the 21st century, we’re nowhere near that on technology. On politics and the future of the country, maybe more so, because that doesn’t require math.

I read the original (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) earlier this year, and I told someone (probably the precocious kid at my martial arts school who likes to read philosophical works, or perhaps my beautiful wife) that I wanted to read that volume so I could read this sequel to it, as this volume was on the outer rank of my to-read books in the hall and was hence present any time that I went looking for a new book to read and did not have something I’d bought that week that I wanted to jump right into. As you can tell, gentle reader, my Web host offered me a good deal on italics this week, so watch this space for their overuse.

It’s not a sequel, of course; it’s one of the books that play upon the title of the Pirsig work and call themselves Zen and the Art of something.

In this case, it’s knitting. The author does play up some of the mindfulness and “in the zone” elements you can get into when you’re sort of focusing on your knitting, but when the habits of the hands leave the mind free to wander or not.

However, this is not a particularly compelling book.

It really doesn’t have much to say aside from the description above; each chapter doesn’t really build upon a theme. Instead, it’s a series of interviews that the author has with creative professionals, educators, or her aunt the nun about what knitting means to each. Which is generally that they can express themselves and become mindful when knitting.

So I had to gut my way through the book, and in the end, it made me want to take up knitting less than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made me want to tackle small engine repair.

This would have been a book to browse during football games, and indeed, that was the goal last year when this book ended up on the table beside the sofa. However, the text portion of the book is dense at the front of the book, chock full of designer names as it creates a slow-to-read name-checking evolution of the rococo style in France, Italy, Britain, and Germany. Only then does it really go into the photography illustrating the rococo style as it is.

So it lounged on that table for almost a football season and a half before I moved it over to the table beside my reading chair for some attention amid the longer work I’m reading (to be announced probably a couple weeks from now; it’s that long).

So what do I remember from the book?

Rococo followed Baroque style in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, peaking in France but with some elements appearing in other countries. It, like Baroque, is elaborate and rounded, but it’s more whimsical than its predecessor and influenced a bit by the contacts with the Orient. Also, aside from some of the sculpture, maybe, it’s not for me.

Which is more than I knew before I read the book; all I knew of Rococo before it was the Rocky Rococo pizza by the slice chain, but I am from Wisconsin (where the chain is based). Which is, really, what I hope for when I glance through these things: A short intro course on something I don’t know with information for further learning should I like a topic or style. But Rococo ain’t it.

My son had a poetry assignment for his seventh grade language arts class, and part of that assignment was to write poems in a variety of styles, including a limerick. Which seems odd to me, gentle reader, as the limerick as properly understood, is a bit off-color in its humor most of the time. In a show of solidarity and to inspire the boy to write the poems, my beautiful wife said that she and I would also write poems, so I scratched out some lines of a clean limerick that isn’t very good. And isn’t very done yet.

But the exercise reminded me of this book, and I remembered its approximate location, so I thought I might browse it while watching football. But it is, erm, “Boldly Illustrated,” and a quick glance at it indicated that I should not read this where my children might see it. For although by the time I was his age, I had illicitly commandeered my mother’s copy of the Frank O. Pinion Dirty Joke book and memorized enough of them to be slightly less unpopular at North Jefferson Middle School. But I’m not sure how much off color humor I want to introduce to my son and, by extension, his Christian school. So I read this book under the blankets in the dark, and I’ll make sure it’s hidden on my bookshelves again where he won’t casually find it.

So. The book is 100 off color limericks by Isaac Asimov. They’re clever for their form, but what makes the book is that Asimov talks about the form in the beginning, and with each limerick he writes a couple of sentences to a couple paragraphs that explain what he thinks of them, how his wife might have helped with it, the circumstances in which he wrote it, and other asides from the mind of Asimov. A book of 100 limericks by Asimov would be less than 200 pages of Asimov talking about his limericks.

So I enjoyed it.

A couple things of note:

• Asimov used the word lollapalooza before the word became cool and then uncool again because of the musical festival.
• One of the limericks has a hand written notation “To Martha From the PE Wall” in tidy cursive on a limerick about male masturbation. I wonder what that’s all about.

A good read for an adult fan of Asimov. Unfortunately, these days, is there any other kind?