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So Ole Says to Lena

The University of Wisconsin Press

The first joke I remember hearing as a kid growing up in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, concerned a boasting contest between three Norwegian farmers over who had dug the deepest pit under the outhouse. While the scatological content doubtless appealed to my six-year-old mind, what I remember best is the description of overalled farmers and the rendering of their speech in a lilting "Norsky" dialect. This simple humorous telling was also the first story I recall, whether heard or read, that was peopled with characters who actually looked and talked like my neighbors in an ethnically diverse farming and logging community in northwestern Wisconsin. I have been fascinated ever since by the intersection of folk humor and region, by the funny stories Upper Midwesterners traditionally tell about themselves and their surroundings.

Makis, Kolaches, and Cudahy

Although the exact contours of the Upper Midwest are open to debate, most arbiters apply the term to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (with perhaps a little overlap into Ontario, Manitoba, the Dakotas, Iowa, Illinois, and Lower Michigan). The Upper Midwest is the meeting place of Woodland and Plains Indians and the American regionwith the most entrenched and varied European-American population. It is a territory of woods, waters, fields, and small towns, with a few modest metropolises like Minneapolis/St. Paul and Milwaukee. Its Great Lakes have always been fished commercially and its northern reaches were once mined extensively, while farming, manufacturing, tourism, and logging are the region's economic mainstays. Here in the land of beer, cheese, and sausage-where the polka is danced and winters are unending and where Lutherans and Catholics predominate-everybody is ethnic, the politics are clean, and the humor plentiful.

Like many citizens of the nation or the world, Upper Midwestern men and women might tell jokes-about the president, some current disaster, generic fools, or even talking parrots-that differ little from those told anywhere else. In the main, however, their humorous folk narratives, for roughly a century, have focused on familiar people, activities, and settings. Native- and European-American numskulls, tricksters, and wits (whether Ojibwa, French, Cornish, German, Irish, Scandinavian, Finnish, Polish, Welsh, Dutch, Swiss, Belgian, Italian, or WASP) farm, log, mine, hunt, and fish; they go to town, school, the tavern, and church; and they argue, astound, fool, fight, and love.

This is not to say that such narratives necessarily emerged in the region. Some did, especially those connected with place names like Sheboygan or with aspects of logger's jargon derived from the landscape. Others were brought over from the old country and modified: a landless Finnish farm laborer becomes a wandering logger, a Polish priest's servant becomes a parish janitor. Still others are widely dispersed throughout America and must have been made over: a stubborn Ozark hillman is recast as a Norwegian, giant mosquitoes buzzing through scores of rustic tall tales are situated in a specific "up north" locale. None of these incremental changes makes any one funny story quintessentially Upper Midwestern. Yet collectively, Upper Midwestern folk humor conveys a preoccupation with peoples, places, speech, and events peculiar to the region and sometimes mysterious to outsiders.

* * *

Why do Finns commemorate December 7?

That's the day Pearl Maki got bombed in Two Harbors.

* * *

How would you pronounce Cudahy if it wasn't in Wisconsin?

Cuda.

* * *

It was harvest time and an old Norwegian farmer needed to sharpen, or slipe, his scythe, but his grindstone, or viev, wasn't working. So he went to his Yankee neighbor and asked, "Can I slipe with your viev? Mine is broken."

* * *

Yah, I went over to pick up Wencl for work. Couldn't find find him anywhere. Finally I hear this noise back by the outhouse, and there he is down in the pit.

"What the hell you doing?" I says.

"Dropped my coat," he says.

"That bummy old coat? I wouldn't go down there after it."

"Yah," he says, "me neither, but I had a kolache in the pocket."

* * *

What's the shortest time in the world?

The time between when the light changes to green and the FIB behind you honks the horn.

* * *

A guy walked into a St. Paul bar with his dog. The Vikings were on the tube, first down inside the other team's ten yard line.

Three plays later and they kick a field goal. The dog gives everyone high fives.

An amazed patron asks the dog owner, "Gee, what does he do when they score a touchdown?"

The guy says, "I don't know, I've only had him two years."

* * *

Under the right circumstances, each of these jokes might coax wild laughter from Upper Midwestemers, but their telling under any circumstances outside the region would likely invite blank stares or, at best, polite chuckles matched by furrowed brows. Here are widely familiar forms: the "riddle joke" with its paring of plot and character to a question/answer format; the conventional "joke," a brief, fictitious narrative that delivers some incongruity in the final punch line. Here are bits of moderately familiar content: the national observance of December 7 as Pearl Harbor Day; the "Cudahy" name as that of a meatpacking giant (along with Swift, Armour, Hormel, and Oscar Meyer); the homophony between slipe and sleep, between viev and wife; the plunge in the mire for a valued object; the probably urban Type-A driver who leans on his horn; and the existence of the Minnesota Vikings as a professional football team. Yet much remains esoteric.

Only those immersed in regional life would know that "Maki" is perhaps the most common Finnish-American name, that Two Harbors on the Minnesota shore of Lake Superior is part of "Finnesota," and that binge drinking is a common northern pastime, especially as winter takes hold. Only Upper Midwesterners would recognize "hey" as a ubiquitous Wisconsin expletive, especially in the greater Milwaukee area (within which Cudahy is a working class suburb) where shouts of "Yah, hey" and "Aina, hey" (isn't that right, hey) drop from every lip. Similarly those within the region would be familiar with dialect jokes, marked by double meanings and misunderstandings that arise from the overlap of several languages, and they would appreciate the improbability of a prudish, probably Lutheran, Norwegian's unwittingly brazen proposition to cuckold his equally strait-laced Yankee neighbor. Any "Bohunk" or bakery eater would associate kolache with a prune-, poppyseed-, or apricot-filled Czech pastry as prominent at church dinners and bazaars as krumkake, kropsu, or potica. Certainly "cheeseheads" from Wisconsin would peg a "FIB" as a cross-state rival, a "Fucking Illinois Bastard" escaping across the border from grimy Chicago, exuding rush-hour freeway manners enroute to dairyland tourist havens. And both Viking fans and hostile Green Bay "Packer-Backers" have made light of the Minnesotans inability to score touchdowns despite the presence of highly touted players and coaches.

Although it would be an overstatement to claim that the cultural worth of these six jokes increases in proportion to their impenetrability by outsiders, it is no exaggeration that the sextet offers insiders a precise glimpse of the familiar. Told about, by, and for Upper Midwesterners, such jokes are valued as fictions that bear essential truths about their shared reality. Together they constitute an important means of creating, acknowledging, and sustaining a rural and small-town world of beer, winter, tavern sociability, religion, and gustatory delights where rival ethnics "talk funny," tease one another, and unite against the breakneck modernity of urban intruders. Elements of this cultural configuration, this world view, are present elsewhere in American life, but its totality exists only in the Upper Midwest.

Talk and Talkers

While work, schools, mass media, travel, government institutions, and an array of other forces may conspire to homogenize all Americans, regional identity lives in everyday conversation. The situations for jocular talk have been manifold in the Upper Midwest. They match the rhythms of life. Weekly occasions for sociable gab might include the following activities: morning gatherings of cafe regulars; lunchtime on the jobsite; afternoon visits to the feedmill or visits by a salesman; evenings at the tavern, around the kitchen table, at the union hall, the softball diamond, the bowling alley, and the fraternal lodge; Saturday auctions, festivals, and dances; and Sunday church suppers and visiting. Life-cycle occurrences, like weddings, funerals, and such seasonal events as Christmas parties, reunions, county fairs, and deer hunting spark the exchange of humorous narratives.

When a number of fine talkers gather with time on their hands, an extended "session," where joke telling exists for its own sake, may well emerge. The lumber camps, where Irish jacks established the tradition of a Saturday evening's entertainment, were legendary for extended story swaps. Here loggers of diverse ethnic backgrounds were thrown together and often compelled, lest they pay a fine, to amuse one another. Roman David "Bimbo" Alexa, a third generation logger of Czech and Italian lineage, fondly remembered sessions in Michigan lumber camps during the early 1950s:

There were lots of stories years ago. We'd swap stories in the evenings. That was one of the pastimes. Some couldn't speak English well, or wouldn't talk much as a rule, but some of the more happy-go-lucky ones- Swedes, Poles, French-they'd be pretty comical.

For Leo Garski, retired from the Army and a maintenance man, recent sessions have come on fishing trips, in hunting camps, at a neighborhood tavern, or following union meetings. Beginning with a single joke, sessions might extend for hours with stories unwinding in skeins. A string of lumber camp jokes, the last of which concerns an Irishman, might lead to Irish stories; an Irishman on the farm might suggest farmer jokes; stories of domestic animals might lead to wild animals, then to hunting, and so on into the night.

Historically such sessions, and even the casual telling of humorous tales, have been dominated by men. Like playing in a dance band, joke telling has been regarded until recently either as something genteel "ladies" did not do because their task was to maintain propriety in the face of male rascality or because the male-dominated society believed that females "just don't know how to tell a joke." Despite such beliefs, Upper Midwestern women have been and continue to be fine storytellers with keen senses of humor. Folklorists and anthropologists may never know for sure just how much women have contributed to the repertoire of jokes generally acknowledged as "male-authored." Accustomed to exchanging an occasional joke in domestic settings-in mixed company over cards at the kitchen table or with other women gathered for coffee-women began expanding their repertoires and their opportunities for jocular talk when they entered the work force in large numbers in the 1940s. Nowadays society has somewhat relaxed its restraints on women, and as a consequence, women are generally free to tell jokes publicly as often as men.

The late Oljanna Venden Cunneen-photographer, waitress, mother, artist, and tour guide-grew up in rural, heavily Norwegian western Dane County, Wisconsin. Following her immigrant mother, she excelled at Scandinavian handwork, fashioning her own bunad, or regional costume replete with intricate Hardanger lace, painting her cupboards in floral rosemale style, and crafting elegant trolls, each of them fitted with the garb and tools of different trades, for merchants in nearby Mount Horeb. With a brother named Ole, perhaps it was inevitable that she also heard "Ole and Lena" jokes and was soon telling them in the virtuoso and witty style that characterized her work with needle and brush. By the time she was in her late fifties, she had strung roughly a score of jokes together to form a coherent immigrant saga which she performed for the amusement of busloads of tourists visiting Little Norway, a pioneer farmstead and ethnic shrine.

As a young boy in the 1910s, Jack Foster of Calumet, Michigan, huddled around the woodstove in his grandmother's boarding house to delight in the stories of Cornish miners. Mixing their "Cousin Jack" way of talking with the region's standard English and with the Copper Country's babble of "foreign" tongues (French, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Ojibwa), these men were what folklorist Richard Dorson called "dialectitians," and Foster became one of them. In the 1980s, marshaling some seventy jests, Foster performed as a featured speaker for local audiences who appreciated his ability to sketch the mining locations, taverns, churches, underground labor, characteristics, and patois of their immigrant ancestors.

The extended monologues of Cunneen and Foster required each to stand and gesticulate, using the conventions of the stage, before a seated audience that clapped and guffawed at appropriate moments. Oljanna Cunneen theatrically donned her Norwegian bunad to project a visual image in keeping with her verbal art. "When I wear this, I'm a character, I can get away with things," she told me.

Most tellers, however, prefer dialogues, alternating as performer then audience whenever jokes are told. They never clap or expect applause; they sit when others sit, stand when others stand; and they seldom tell more than two jokes in a sequence. Their egalitarian, everyday mode of performance is not, however, without artistry. Most rely subtly on gesture, pauses, mimicry, and changes in tone to convey action, emphasis, characterization, and mood. And unlike Cunneen and Foster, who had their carefully constructed sequential routines at the ready, most joke tellers depend upon an extended session or "something that just comes up" to spark the recollection of jokes.

Continue...

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Excerpted from So Ole Says to Lena Copyright © 2001 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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