me working out ONG 35

It's just something that jumped out at me...something that I've looked over in studying these wisdom statements.

"Fixed, often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other sorts can be found occasionally in print, indeed can be 'looked up' in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them."

To literate society, these are just wisdom statements with some sort of logic possessed within them. However, nowadays nobody would say that a person who has a great memory of these statements would be wise...nowadays if someone were to say to me something proverbial like say I come in late to this 9 am class and say, "Aww, my back is killing me! I was up till 3 last night." and someone responds saying,

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

I'm not 100% sure how I would respond...it's possible that I might just give him an incredulous stare....I imagine I could come up with a response eventually, but it would probably just be "ummm, yeah" or something to that effect.

However surprising it may be that these proverbs were knowledge to people in the world today, it makes sense to a pre-literate society. Just like we were talking about in class, if you can't write something down then you have to remember it, and of course the best way to remember it is to make it formulaic, as in rhyming or in verse.
Can you imagine the first shift, that is from the oral culture with knowledge contained in formulaic sayings to a literate culture where knowledge can be saved in writing and not necessarily simply remembered?

It's actually easy to imagine since we have many proverbs from the previous oral culture with us here today, such as the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, and new proverbs are being invented all the time throughout human history, such as Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richards Almanack, where the above proverb was taken.

The interesting thing to think of is that people at one time actually read these collected sayings to GAIN knowledge. It doesn't seem like knowledge at all, because we are so immersed in literacy...I guess that's why I looked over it.

my first memory--money in the crib

so my first memory is a bit unusual...when I was in the 3rd or 4th grade I was asked to answer this same question...and when I thought and thought for most of the day trying to recall (and recall chronologically) so after awhile I started looking at pictures of me when I was very young. And one picture that I looked at caused me to recall the memory of the event. It was a picture of me, in a crib, holding a bunch of money. The only problem (not realized as a problem by me) was that I was only 11 months old.
I remember the scene, everything was fuzzy and lacked form. I was on my back and the sun was shining in from the window closest to my left foot and it was blurred into the brown rails of my crib; the money in my hands did not have its usual form but instead just looked like a green blob. It wasn't really a scene, but more of a picture that I remember...

The problem was that my teacher didn't believe me, she told me that it was impossible for me to remember that. The only reason I didn't take her word for it was because of the memory I had of the sun shining in. It was such a ordinary detail in the picture...the fact that the sun was shining in on me...that I highly doubt that I could have even recognized it in the picture to imagine it. And to add to that, I wasn't trying to make anything up in the first place anyways...I looked at a multitude of pictures from before that and my memory did not recall anything.
Regardless, I came up with another memory for the class project; me watching my dad watch football and me mimicking his reactions. It worked for the assignment, but I always thought that that first memory was genuine

Stand up poets?

As I was reading Chapter 2 in Ong's Orality and Literacy, I realized that there was significant resemblances of the rules and properties of oral poetry to common day stand up comedy. I will explain by using examples that seemed obvious to me when I was reading last night.

"Poets...were not expected to use prefabricated material. If a poet did echo bits of earlier poems, he was expected to modulate this into his own 'kind of thing'" (Ong, 21).

"Only beginners or permanently poor poets used prefabricated stuff" (Ong, 22).

If one simply replaces the word poet with stand up comedian and the word poems into material or more specifically other comedians material, it is easy to see the similarities that first struck me. As a general rule in the stand-up community, it is very much discouraged to use another comedian's material. Offenders are known as hacks, and are often black-balled by the entire community. see these links for some examples of this in real life:


Dane Cook accused of stealing jokes:
(note: I know alot of people who are fans of Dane Cook...I'm not trying to go after him or anything. But it is true that of the many stand-up comedians I have talked to ALL of them consider him a hack)

Carlos Mencia accused by Joe Rogan:
Basically Joe Rogan calls out Mencia for being a fraud (i.e. he's not really mexican, he's actually from Honduras, his name is not Carlos but Paul I think anyways, and he stole jokes and the comedian he stole them from confronts him)


However one argument that is easily made by comedians accused of stealing material is the commonality of what's funny. For example think about relationships between men of women...like married people don't have sex or are miserable. The argument is that comedians generally can notice the same things as funny in society but they go after it in different ways. Thus comedians are drawing awareness to the same thing but doing their "own kind of thing" as Ong is talking about.

Like the oral poets, a stand-up comedian's bit is based on a formulaic system that is memorized and is also made on the fly depending on the response of the audience. Also, pieces are altered, added, or deleted based on what the comedian guesses will work (that is make people laugh and not be pissed...for example not the best idea to make fun of Butte in Butte, but GREAT idea in Bozeman or anywhere else in Montana).
Thus often every performance of a stand up routine will be different every time, but also very very similar because of the original memorized formula.

There is however a difference between a stand-up performance and a blonde joke or a chicken crossed the road joke or a knock-knock joke. These kind of jokes depend upon a strict (yet flexible) formulaic structure.

George Carlin writes in his book When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

"A GENERIC JOKE: A person goes into a place and says something to another person. The second person says something back to the first person, who listens to that and then says something back to the second person. The thing he says back is really funny."



More or less, jokes depend upon this formulaic structure even to simply deviate from it. For example: many jokes can be explained in two ways, but not all, it would take too much thinking right now for me to uncover them all.

An event is presented, the listener is led to believe that a certain occurrence will happen, and another occurrence happens that the listener did not see coming and thus it is funny.

Two men are out golfing. Upon seeing a funeral procession in the distance, the man driving the golf cart stops, steps out, and removes his hat, while the other man watches in confusion. When the procession is finished and out of sight, the man puts back on his hat and gets in the cart and starts driving as if nothing had happened. The other man says "why did you do that?" The man says, "well I was married to her for 30 years, I figured it was the least I could do."

What's funny in the joke is that the listener did not see the conclusion coming and the irony of "the least you can do" is realized, as a man is literally doing about the least he can do when his wife dies.

This is interesting and I think I will try and get back to this later...

First day of class

try as I might I could not unearth what my last name means...and unfortunately I did not think finding out that meaning (if it exists because according to some of the sites I looked at some names don't mean squat!) was important enough for me to dive into that never-ending game of discovery and filing known as "genealogy."

My mom always tries to play that game with me...telling me what different ethnicities I am (German-French-Jewish--interesting combo). All in all, it doesn't really interest me. But I did want to find out what my last name means...I guess mainly just because it is such an important part of my identity. In an odd way, when you say "Meznarich" you mean me...in a sense anyways. And this name being so linked to me as a person, I suppose I simply wanted to understand where it came from, as if when I understood that it would lead to some sort of epiphany or at least provide an albeit weak explanation of me. I suppose I was taken up for a minute with the romantic notion that my name might mean something stoic or simply cool.
But unfortunately I couldn't find anything, and I think I'm okay with that.
I am an English major, so I'll just steal that maxim "what's in a name" and call this blog done.