Peer Review #1

After reading many of my classmates’ posts on their encounter projects with the world, I have been able to settle on one that I especially liked. On “Alex’s Blog” I was able to read about her encounter with a joke that her boyfriend told her to make her feel better when she was sick. I thought that this post was an excellent example of what folklore is and how it affects us. This joke goes something like this: A guy walks into a doctor’s office with celery in his nose, and carrot in his ear and a banana under his arm. He tells the doctor that he does not know what is wrong with him. The Doctor tells him that he knows what is wrong with him, and that he is not eating right. I found this joke very amusing mostly because it hits on multiple levels. One, the guy is eating improperly by missing his mouth…that one is obvious. The other level is that many people get sick because they do not eat healthy. I thought Alex did a great job with this because improper eating is a big problem for college kids because we do not have out parents’ to feed us anymore. The joke that her boyfriend told her is also a great example of folklore because her boyfriend heard it from his dad. This shows how we learn and hear jokes…they are passed down to us through word of mouth. Who knows how many generations that joke has been passed down until she was able to hear it? And now she has shared it with our class, which will in turn lead to our class telling it to various people we know. It is amazing how the phenomenon can occur so quickly, and the easiest way to understand just how this happens is through the study of folklore. This is my first response for the peer review post in my Folklore F-121 class.