Doc's Research

Next paragraphs

2005-03-24T11:48:00.000-08:00

I've advanced my writing a few steps beyond those initial introductory paragraphs. When you reach the end of this post, you're ready to go to the body of the paper. I want you to be doing the same in your posts.

Davies suggests that at least some ethnic joking is an attempt to distance the current self from the past self. Many of the jokes from Dalkullan fit this type. The jokes about peasant society, about the rising Stockholm middle class, and the boys in compulsory military service all fit the type. These were roles from which the Swedish immigrant was distancing him or her self. The new arrival may have been a peasant in the old country, but was attempting to leave that behind. Some of the new arrivals were part of the rising middle class in Sweden, and were attempting to rise even higher here in America, in part by effacing that Swedish middle class pretentiousness. Some of the new arrivals had done the compulsory service, though many had left the old country rather than do the compulsory service. These were all types of the past that were being left behind, and the ethnic joke, in part, gave the newcomer an image to part from.

At the same time, however, the American Swedish jokes found in the Kure Kalendar introduce us to jokes about “what we are becoming,” a new category of joke targets. These new targets include the American pretentions – for example the blommer girl wife who believes she can learn to ride of bicycle, the “greenhorn” being swindled and in turn swindling others, the rising American who changes her name from “Elmina Sjögren” to “Minnie Seagreen.”

An additional complicating factor for the joking is their appearance as printed material. What does that mean for the creation of an ethnic image? Unlike the oral joking, where, as Norrik (2001) formal considerations and audience and their expectations play an enormous part in defining what is “funny,” the literary joke raises a decidedly different set of questions. While audience is still important to the consideration of the literary joke, I would assert that collector and author are more important to defining what is “funny” and what is to be left behind. In other words, there is a democratic structure to the told joke, the humor of the joke being a function of shared community. On the other hand, the literary joke functions hierarchically. Someone in a literary circle decides that a particular story is worthy of preservation, and should be preserved with just these conventions in order to be thought of as “funny.” In the case of both the Swedish joke in America and the Swedish American joke, it is an upper class, an elite, that is making the choice of what is humorous, what deserves to be mocked, what ought to be left behind, and what ought not be adopted. In order, then to understand the nature of the boundary between past and present and anticipated future we need to understand the producers of these joke collections and humorous stories. As we’ll see the Swedish American community identity is reflected from above, rather than growing from below. Much as was the case in the life of the Swedish American church, the piety and jokes of the lower class were used in order to create a middle class that could succeed and assimilate to the American context. As Winokur points out in his study of film as an expression of ethnicity, in order to be accepted as an ethnic, there is a need for ethnic self-effacement. In the case of the Swedish American community this effacement came from the community’s “betters” and determined the image of what it meant to be a “good” Swedish American.

In another sense, however, the Swedish (and Scandinavian in general) ethnic was competing for a spot on the American stage. Ethnics were defined by superficial stereotypes reflected in and created by the kinds of jokes told about the ethnic. The Irish were drunk and inclined to graft. The Scots, frugal to the point of stinginess. Italians greasy. The British snobbish, and so forth. The role reserved for the Swede (and Norwegian) was and is dumb. The jokes the Swedes told about themselves represented the dumbness of the immigrant, but they also presented a broader picture. In the old jokes “dumb” was only one of a repertory of possible ethnic characteristics. It was the Swede who defined a Swedish identity for the Swedish American. The characteristic that was least offensive to Swedish sensibility was “dumb.” The other characteristics were either irrelevant or offensive to the Swedish immigrant community.

The American context was happy to slot the Swede into the chosen character. At almost the same moment that Kure was popularizing a more sanitized “dumb” Swede (as opposed to drunken or conniving, characteristics common in the Swedish peasant joke), Chicago’s Essanay studio was producing a series of “dumb” Swede films in Wallace Beery’s “Sweedie” comedies. Between 1914 and 1916 Beery starred as “Sweedie,” a bumbling Swedish maid, in 25 one reelers. While the titles and plots vary, the central theme is “Sweedie’s” inability to deal with the world he/she encounters. The same over-whelmed and therefore “dumb” Swede reappears in the films of El (Elmer) Brendel, particularly in the film Just Imagine. The stereotypical “dumb Swede” became a stock Hollywood character, becoming a lite-motif in films such as The Major and the Minor, where Ginger Rogers poses as a Swedish American preteen heading home to Iowa in order to ride the train for half fare.

All of these film characters draw upon the “bondekomik” or “farmer comic” tradition of Scandinavia, given literary form in the jokes and stories reprinted in the Dalkullan books. The first literary appearance of the type is in Frederick Dahlström’s popular 1850 play Värmländingarna, the most popular play in the Chicago Swedish American theatre repertory. The plot revolves around a wedding on a large estate between the son of the estate and the daughter of the largest farmer. The play introduces the “bonde-komik” figure of Loppare Nisse, a strange speaking little figure who adds a comic element to the wedding ceremony both through the odd sound of his dialect and the enormity of his boasting. This figure transforms, over time, into the figures of Olle Skratthult, (Hjalmar Pettersson), and others in the tradition. In Sweden, the figure finds a home in two traditions, the “större bonde” of Edvard Persson, and Åsa Nisse’s peasant farmer. These comic figures make their own impressions on the Swedish American comic tradition. Persson’s movies, in particular, remained an important enough tradition in Swedish Americana to justify a movie in which Persson’s bewildered farmer character travels to America in search of a long lost brother.

Finally, the “dumb Swede” tradition is reclaimed by the non-Swedish speaking Swedish American in the form of the Sven and Ole jokes that appear in the 1970’s and beyond. The line between the jokes of Bland Kollingar och Kogubbar is neither straight nor bright, but I would assert that the image of the “dumb Swede” in the Sven and Ole jokes is the same image, born of the same impulses. It is an acceptable way to assert an acceptable identity.

While the line is not clear, it is worth our while to attempt to retrace the history of the dumb Swede, for that attempt will open a rich vein of humor and creating a taxonomy of that humor may well enable us to consider the humor of other ethnicities as containing a similar richness. The first issue that must be addressed, however, is the literary nature of the joke collections examined. Because I assert that the jokes are collected “hierarchically,” and support a hierarchical view of what the Swedish American ought to become, we need to examine the social hierarchy on both sides of the Atlantic. The jokes themselves reveal one side of the rhetorical equation: these are what a literary collector believed to be funny. An examination of the American collector and publisher of these jokes, and his likely “circle” lead us to assert that they shared the view of the Swedish “elite” describing the boundaries between polite and impolite society. Thus we need to describe that group as well as the Swedish “circle.”

Our examination of the Swedish American joke begins then, with Albert Engström in Sweden and Captain Anders Löfström in America.

By this time

2005-03-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

At this point in your research you should have material like this developed: the beginnings of an introduction, a thesis draft, and a draft of an outline. This post (Wednesday 3-16) is only the draft of introductory paragraphs. It is a very loose draft. I won’t have the final product until much later, but doing a draft early makes me think about the Thesis of the paper, and important step at this point.

Humor theorists have most often considered the ethnic joke as if it were a subset of the Jewish ethnic joke. For example, Juni and Katz, following Freud, have examined Jewish joking in both London and Eastern Europe for signs of a masochistic tendency in the joking. Grotjahn and others have gone so far as to declare that without oppression Jews cease to be funny. While Amos debunks the "Myth of Jewish Humor," few have followed him out of the exceptionalistic view of Jewish humor and into a broader analysis of ethnic humor.

One who has done the later Christie Davies. In her massive study of ethnic humor she demonstrates the social and cultural function of humor binaries. For Davies the ethnic joke is not about punishing a victim group or releasing repressed anger. For Davies, the ethnic joke is about boundaries. Following Davies’ lead recent examinations of vaudevillian ethnic humor have demonstrated that genre’s dependence upon stock characters and stereotyped others and the social function of the humor in locating the immigrant’s position in the larger society.

On the other hand, John Winokur’s study of film as an expression of ethnicity also sees the ethnic humor as being about the immigrants place in the larger society. Winokur, using, in part, a Marxist analysis, argues that the ethnics in the film industry advanced as they effaced their own ethnicity. In other words, they used ethnic values in the humor in order to deny their own status as ethnics. In so far as they were able to put aside their ethnic identity they were able to succeed. While Winokur’s study does not closely parallel this study, we will find that the American Swede saw success and maintenance of Swedishness as competing values, and ultimately opted for an American identity with an important tie to the past identity in the ethnic joke.

What none of the ethnic humor studies have been able to show thus far is the historical arch of an ethnic group’s joking as it became assimilated to a new culture. Looking at Swedish American humor from the turn of the 20th century allows us a glimpse into the shift from humor related to the country of origin to humor related to the new country. Looking at a relatively compact ethnic group like the Swedish Americans allows one to limit the material under consideration. Because this was a highly literate social group that valued the printed word, we have considerable materials available for study. The material is a combination of illustrated jokes from the old world, and illustrated (and un-illustrated) humorous stories from the new world. The literary nature of this humor allows a discussion of the nature of the community which valued it, as well as a discussion of the probably oral sources behind both some of the stories and most of the jokes. While we are not justified in assuming that the printed joke is the same as the oral version of the same, there are some hermeneutic principles that will enable us to discern, in part, the redactors hand in the jokes.
Most important in this study is the opportunity afford us by the comparison of old world and new world materials. This allows us to see what happens to humor in the same social group – or as LaFave, et. al. named it, "identification class," when their life situation alters radically. What we see is that the old stereotypes and scripts are transferred to the new setting. The old characters that played out stereotypical scripts are now refashioned to meet the new situation.

This study seeks to address the changing boundaries in the Swedish American community and its humor during the fin de siecle and slightly beyond. We will examine, first, the materials from Sweden that the Swedish immigrant population found funny by examining one of the numerous collections of Swedish humor published by Dalkullan company of Chicago. Then we’ll compare that material with a more limited sample of literary humorous stories published in the Kure Kalendar, an annual from Axel Johnson’s Svenska Kuriren published between 1896 and 1904 (?). What we’ll find is that there is a continuity of Joke scenario and script between the Swedish and Swedish American situation. However, certain stock characters and some situations totally disappear, being inappropriate or unknown in the new land. While the language in which the joke is told shifts radically, both Swedish and Swedish American joking uses the "odd sounding" character to comic effect. Some peasant jokes are told not because the peasant says something stupid, but because the way the thing is said itself sounds odd or funny. The same condition continues in the use of American Swedish, a regionalism that developed and disappeared in the Swedish American community.

Always Like This?

2005-03-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

I was reading Juni and Katz' analysis of Jewish humor in London, Vilnius and Warsaw, and Latvia, humor from the same period as my first pieces. What struck me was that these scholars, while knowledgeable about some of the humor of the period were totally unaware of other currents in international humor. They were also reliant upon some rather discredited sources, and willing to cite a source who argued contrary to their position as if he supported their position. They also discarded a large number of jokes that did not fit their classifications rather than alter the classification system to reflect the larger context of ethnic wit.

I have to wonder, is it always like this? Do people always come to material with their pet theories and minds made up and then force material to fit the descriptions they've created? It certainly seems to be so in this case.

Well, if everyone else is doing this kind of intellectually shoddy work, what is to prevent me from doing the same?

In other words, to echo a colleague from Sterling College, "we are all blind to our blindnesses" and if we are all blind to our blindnesses, how do we learn to see the limits of our own research? It is a thought I'm continuing to ponder as I attempt to find a way to classify the several hundred jokes in Bland Kolingar och Kogubbar.

2005-02-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

This Funny Stuff is Hard Work

2005-02-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

Humor requires mental gymnastics. Freud argued that much humor derives from a compression of meaning. I think that some does, as wit. But it also requires an expansion of meaning, and a common base on which to draw. For example, I just read this joke (which is what got me thinking about the mental part of humor). It’s not exactly a joke, but two lines of a humorous poem, “The Soul’s Corporal.”

”Pär Lagerkvist stiger ur en taxi.

Säg att ”Barabbas”
är den roligaste bok du läst!”
(Pär Lagerkvist gets out of a taxi

Tell him that “Barabbas”
is the funniest book you’ve ever read!)

For the average American reader this isn’t at all funny. In order for it to be mildly amusing you have to know both Pär Lagerkvist and his novel Barabbas. To be more humorous you have to think of the corporal’s role in the military, as the lowest, and therefore the loudest and most insistent, superior. If you know all that and encounter this “joke” it is funny. I laughed when I read the two lines. If it has to be explained, it looses much of the humor.

Joking is a very difficult mental process, requiring a good deal of psychic energy, and requiring mental quickness to make all the connections. The original meaning is expanded by the context of joking.

I guess it's personal

2005-02-13T20:56:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting at my computer, in the back room of the second floor. On the television in the front bedroom I've got Blue Collar Comedy Tour, and I'm listening to Larry the Cable guy. On another screen on the computer I'm reading the Sunday funnies. Do you think there's some connection to my research project - like maybe this is something of a personal problem?

Moving Along

2005-02-11T11:34:00.000-08:00

As I put together my preliminary bibliography for this part of the project, I also re-read several pieces in the secondary literature. The more I read, the larger the project could become. I've found some very interesting secondary sources, like Neal Norrick's analysis of timing in joke telling. It strikes me as a helpful account that would work well if I were examining the rhetoric of the Sven and Ole joke. So maybe I should look at the Sven and Ole jokes and how they get told among Swedish Americans in the post-Keillor world. But that's way beyond the focus for this first piece of work.

Back to my original focus, the jokes of the fin de siecle, I'm still taken by Freud's tendentious jokes. La Fave and Marshall argue that those jokes should be seen as an argument of the self of the present with the self of the past (1964). I can't see that examining the jokes I've assembled.

It seems to me that these Swedes are arguing the self of the present against the self of the future. I need to look more carefully at that issue. I also need to examine what it means that these were the jokes published, and that they were published from what might be called the "Bohemian" wing of the Swedish American artistic circle. Is there perhaps a bit of projection? or of "displacement" despite what I've argued in a previous post? Might Freud be correct after all?

Types of Jokes

2005-02-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

I'm not terribly far in my literature review, so I'm not sure what other gems Freud will yield, but I do have one thus far, and one I've come to on my own.

The introduction to The Joke speaks of Freud's analysis of the tendentious joke. According to my dictionary, tendentious means: "calculated to promote a particular cause or viewpoint; having an underlying motive." I think that describes many of the jokes in Bland kolingar och kogubbar, one of my major joke sources.

But there is another type of joke, the "transgressive" joke. I don't know that Freud writes about these. These are jokes that get their humor from "shock" value. They're the ones, like Andrew Lofstrom's first joke in Bland kolingar. This one is a favorite of mine. It shows a black congregation in Georgia, all of the members in the comicbook blackface representation. The preacher and the sexton have arranged for a dove to be let down when the preacher says, "And in those days the Holy Spirit will descend upon you." The problem is that the church cat has eaten the dove.

So, on cue, the sexton calls out, "Pastor, the cat's eaten the bird, should I let down the cat."

This is clearly transgressive today. It is an impolite joke that should be followed with "I know you didn't say that." Was it transgressive in its day? (1901 or 1907, date is not clear) I'm not certain. Swedish American attitudes toward race were like those of every other white group, so the racial aspect would not have been transgressive. But the religious aspect may well have been.

One of my steps will be to sort jokes on the basis of transgression and tendentiousness. That follows the literature review. Time to get to work on it.

Research Review

2005-02-07T00:07:00.000-08:00

I'm reviewing research at the moment, a preliminary step for me. I've looked at the question of humor and its relationship to ethnic identity before, but not in a systematic way. I started with Freud's examination of the relationship of the joke to the unconscious (1905).

John Carey, in his introduction to the Penguin volume points out one of the problems - Freud's insistence that this work fit the pattern established in his dream studies. This is problematic when we come to Freud's concept of "displacement." It is problematic because we usually don't see "jokes" in relation to their original teller, and whatever "displacement" has occured has occured for the original teller of the joke. Those of us retelling the joke do not have the same "baggage" or "issues" that the original teller might (or might not) have had.

The other problem is in the nature of the jokes Freud seems to spend most of his time analyzing. These are not "jokes" the way we think of jokes, or the way the jokes are told in Swedish America. Freud's "jokes" are more "witty sayings," which, of course, fits the German title of the work, Der Witz und seine Bezeihung, etc. Wit isn't excluded from these jokes, though the wit is often coarse and unrefined, even when filtered through the refined work of Albert Engstrom and Anders Eckstrom.

For me, the appeal of Freud remains in his "compression" as a source of humor, and the mental resources it takes to understand humor. Freud is a careful analyst of the joke, just as he is of the psyche. As a model, there is something here and I will continue with my review.

But last night, while interviewing one of the candidates for the English position, I was put in mind of another concept that may well serve better. W.E.B. Dubois writes of "Double mindedness" or "double consciousness." I need to look at that concept. As a set of words it does work to describe the immigrant in humor and the humor of the immigrant. That's if I understand it correctly. It has been a long time since I read Dubois. I will re-read this week.

I also need to dig at my notes and see how far I got at this project the last time. I'm not having great success locating films of Edvard Persson - a key for understanding later Swedish American humor. I wonder if I can get the Ole Skratthult records, or if there is a commercially available collection. I think I saw one, but have to look some more.

I've made my choice

2005-02-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

For better or worse I'm going to work on the issue of the American Swedish joke. I reviewed one of the principle sources, the book Bland Kollingar och Kogubbar, published in 1901 in Chicago. It is mostly pirated jokes and illustrations from Swedish artists, particularly Albert Engstrom and Anders Forsberg. But there is at least one Gus Higgins and I think one from Anders (Andrew) Lofstrom, the owner of the publishing concern.

Getting historical information about these folks may be one of my difficulties.

I need to go through this book and identify as many of the contributors as I can.

I need to get background on the artists and the jokesters.

I need to set the cultural climate in which the jokes were told (I know where to go for some of that, I just have to see if I can find the book about Chicago's Swedish Theatre [aside from Henriet Naeseth's book]).

I need to review the general literature on humor and jokes that I've assembled over the years.

I need to take a look at the articles in the International Humor magazine and determine the style of writing and citations (whether APA, MLA or other).

This is a formidable task before I even get to the question I'm trying to investigate. I wonder if I have bitten off more than it is possible to accomplish in this one term.

2005-02-02T13:27:00.000-08:00

Nothing like a good ice cream cone in the middle of winter.

2005-02-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

My dad. They say we look a lot alike. I can't see it. Wish I looked this good when I was this young.

What Shall I do?

2005-02-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning a spring term with a small Senior class enrolled in our course called "Senior Project." Since this is a small group learning how to do communication and rhetorical research, I'm going to join them in the research project.

My problem is choosing the project. I've two that have been hanging fire for several years.

The first is an examination of the rhetoric of the cookbook. It seems to me that the appearance of the cookbook and the rise of an urbanized, nuclear family, middle brow culture are closely linked. It also seems to me that the Swedish Americans were consumers of the cookbook (they still are, in fact.) The problem is that our Swedish library here at Bethany doesn't contain the cookbooks and the "Skattkamarar" that would give me information about the content and the chronology of the cult of domesticity.

The other possibility is an exploration of the Swedish American joke. There are a few more resources in our library for this research, and I've done much of the background for it. That's leading me to decide that I'll spend this spring working through the joke, particularly the imported joke and what it meant to ethnic identity.

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