Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

shaggy 
dog stories;
other kinds of jokes include dirty jokes, sick or tasteless jokes, ethnic 
jokes, and numskull jokes. Following cycles of interest to youngsters, jokes flour-
ish, then fade; sometimes, dormant jokes become popular again later on.
Since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s 
Jokes and Th
eir Relation to the Un-
conscious
(1905), scholars have analyzed the significance of dirty jokes. Gershon 
Legman states, “The smutty joke is like a denudation of a person of the opposite 
sex toward whom the joke is directed. Through the utterance of obscene words, 
the person attacked is forced to picture the parts of the body in question, or 
the sexual act, and is shown that the aggressor himself pictures the same thing” 
(12). While this Freudian definition focuses on sexual and hostile elements that 
deserve attention, it presumes that dirty jokes are mainly told by males to females 
(or by females to males) to make the listener feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. 
Many dirty jokes told by children do not follow such a pattern. More commonly, 
children share what they know about sex through telling dirty jokes, enjoying 
the chance to use taboo words in stories kept secret from parents and teachers. 
Scholars who have analyzed dirty jokes according to Freudian theory include 
Martha Wolfenstein and Alan Dundes; their contributions to children’s folklore 
scholarship are discussed in chapter 4.
Sick or tasteless jokes introduce subjects in such bad taste that they provoke 
nervous laughter. Following current concerns and crises, sick and tasteless joke 
cycles rise and fall. Although their tastelessness horrifies some people, these 
jokes serve the purpose of releasing tension related to difficult subjects. Taste-
less jokes about disabled individuals express people’s worry about disabilities. 
A case in point is the Helen Keller riddle-joke cycle, an example of which is 
“How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her? They rearranged the furniture.” 
Some tasteless joke cycles are related to specific historical crises. When the AIDS 

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26 Children’s 
Folklore
epidemic became a frightening subject in Europe and the United States in the 
early 1980s, both children and adults began to tell AIDS jokes. The explosion of 
the American space shuttle 
Challenger
in 1986 gave rise to such riddle-jokes as 
“What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts” (Simons 263). 
Other tasteless riddle-jokes have sprung up after the deaths of celebrities, includ-
ing England’s Princess Diana (“What does DIANA stand for? Died in a nasty 
accident”). Through such jokes, children and adults have released tension by 
laughing at subjects that have no intrinsic humorous value.
Similar in their level of social inappropriateness, ethnic jokes push the en-
velope of acceptability by disadvantageously comparing one ethnic group with 
another. Such jokes tend to criticize relatively recent immigrants and people of 
neighboring countries. In Norway, for example, people tell Swedish jokes; resi-
dents of Sweden tell jokes about Norwegians. American ethnic jokes have tended 
to characterize the targeted ethnic group as having little money, poor hygiene, 
and low motivation to succeed. Just as tasteless jokes release tension about worri-
some subjects, ethnic jokes call for laughter about interethnic tension.
Less injurious but still offensive to some people are numskull jokes, which 
make fun of stupidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, “little moron” riddle-jokes flour-
ished (“Why did the little moron throw his clock out the window? Because he 
wanted to see time fly”). Blonde jokes have been popular in the 1990s and early 
twenty-first century. In her essay “Dumb Blondes, Dan Quayle, and Hillary 
Clinton: Gender, Sexuality, and Stupidity in Jokes” (1997), Jeannie B. Thomas 
suggests that “the contemporary rise of dumb-blonde jokes may be linked to 
the rise in women’s visibility in public places and in places of power since the 
women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s” (278). One of the riddle-jokes in 
her article, collected from a 13-year-old boy, is “Why does the blonde climb over 
the glass wall? To see what’s on the other side” (281). Thomas aptly notes the 
connection between this joke’s glass wall and the glass ceiling that has made it 
difficult for women to seek higher-level employment (309).
Routines of Victimization
In routines of victimization, one child embarrasses or shocks the other by 
making him or her do something that ends badly. John H. McDowell explains 
that routines of victimization “countenance such infractions as lying without 
compunction, breaking frames without warning, openly contradicting self and 
other, making unsavory allegations concerning other, and in some cases actu-
ally punishing other with physical violence” (39). Catch riddles belong to this 
broader category, which includes both verbal and partly verbal interactions. Mary 
and Herbert Knapp call routines of this kind “ambush games” (76 –77); the Opies 
call them “tricks” and “traps” (
Lore and Language
57–72), and Leea Virtanen calls 
them “traps,” citing several examples (54).

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De
fi
nitions and Classi
fi
cations 27
RHYMES
Counting-Out Rhymes
Counting-out rhymes give children formulae for choosing players or desig-
nating someone to take the role of “it.” H. C. Bolton’s 
Th
 e Counting-Out Rhymes 
of Children 
(1888) was the first study of such rhymes. Bolton states that people 
used counting-out rhymes for divination, establishing patterns to identify sac-
rificial victims (26). The idea that counting-out rhymes originated in ancient 
Druids’ sacrifices has appealed to many people. Elliott Oring’s essay “On the 
Tradition and Mathematics of Counting-Out” (1997) refutes Bolton’s premise, 
suggesting that stories about mathematical formulas for choosing victims have a 
better basis in fact. The “Josephus problem,” for example, concerns legends about 
Jewish soldiers’ determination of who will commit suicide while trapped in a cave 
by Roman soldiers during the Jewish-Roman War of the first century a.d. Flavius 
Josephus carefully chooses his place in the circle of soldiers to make sure that he 
will survive the counting process; he is the only soldier who lives to explain what 
happened.
Studies of children’s counting-out rhymes have shown that children know how 
to choose players they prefer. In Kenneth S. Goldstein’s “Strategy in Counting-
Out” (1971), based on fieldwork with children in Philadelphia, he identifies such 
forms of manipulation as “skipping over,” “calculation,” and “rhyme extension” 
(167–78). Later studies have had similar results. Andy Arleo’s essay “Strategy in 
Counting-Out: Evidence from Saint-Nazaire, France” (1991) offers interesting 
examples. Sitting in a circle, children wait for the counter to tap one foot or fist 
of each participant; occasionally the children stand up and wait for a tap on the 
chest. To get the preferred outcome, a counter skips certain players, starts with a