LL-L "Traditions" 2007.04.15 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L  -  15 April 2007 - Volume 05

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From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
Subject: LL-L "Demographics" 2007.04.13 (02) [E]

Dear Ron:

Subject: L-Lowlands. Ethnic Humour.

I am the victim of linguistic laziness. There is floating around in the
family a massive tome, 'Till Ulenspeghel' by Da Costa, calligraphied,
illuminated, illustrated & beautifully bound, & I can only enjoy the
occasional Flemish interpolations, & must go to lesser interpretations for
the meat.

Tell, why is Low German & Afrikaans humour so scatalogical? e.g. Till hears
a young mother endlessly urging her child to go on the potty & eventually he
has enough of the matter & while she momentarily drifts away he shifts the
child off & makes a donation on its behalf, only Mama is so endlessly
fulsome in her wonder & praise of the infant Till flees in disgust.

Van der Merwe decides he wants an oil-well, because those who do get so
rich. So he calls in his brother who bores artesian wells & tells him where
to put the hole & to carry on until they strike oil. But this is the Karoo
Shield, formed in pre-Carbonacious times, & of course not even water comes.
But Van is nothing if not thrifty & makes the best of a bad job & puts an
outhouse over the hole. Then he inaugurates it, & dies in action, so to
speak. The Court of Inquiry asks his wife for her input & she muses, "Well
the van der Merwes are strange folk, & so stubborn! I know my husband, when
he drops something, he holds his breath until he hears it fall."

For Cape Coloureds, on the other hand, a joke is merely the vehicle for
their lightning-fast repartee, like. Gammat who walks past a ship moored in
Capetown Harbour & nearly catches a faceful of slops. He shouts up to the
ship, "Hey, your Father was a fisheries inspector & your mother a
harbour-seal!" the Captain looks out of a porthole & shouts, "Who are you
talking to?" Response, "You, thunderguts, you with the ship round your
neck!"

Gammat goes to the movies, & on the way meets Rachel, he joshingly asks her,
"What does this 'V' stand for, Rachel?" while with his finger he traces the
neck-line line of a rather low 'V'-neck sweater. "Oh, Gammat," she shyly
responds, "the 'V' stands for 'Virgin." "Such a pity!" says Gammat, "I was
going to invite you to join me to the bioscope right now, but I suppose it
wouldn't be proper for a virgin..." "Never mind," says Rachel hastily,
"Gammat, it's an old jersey!"

So much High Dutch wit, on the other hand, is simultaneously subtle & erotic
& often makes scabrous reference to religious figures. e.g. The Mother
Superior had to visit the Tante in a strange House, & saw the seat up, &
fainted.

I could share another one about Jakob de Doper, but it may be too raunchy
for mixed company.

Why is the middle Eastern Nasredin so political? e.g. They come to a city
gate but the guards won't let them in without a 'donation' until Nasredin
objects that there is a relative of the Sultan among the party. In some
alarm they let the company pass through until one guard with more of his
native wits about him asks, "Effendi, & who is he of the Sultan's
household?" the wit points to the last one of the party, a heavily loaded
donkey, & says, "Him." History does not relate...

Some other city, some other Sultan, grabs Nasredin & orders him to teach his
donkey to speak Persian within a year, or die. His friends go into mild
mourning on his behalf & he tells them to relax, "A year is a long time. The
Sultan may die, I may die, the donkey may die..."

Some real boffins have studied humour, but I still don't know why I laugh.
They say a Prussian did his doctoral thesis on humour, & forever after, he
would hear one or another anecdote out & after due consideration declare,
"Yes, that is a joke..."

Yrs,
Mark

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From: Kevin Caldwell <kevin.caldwell1963 at verizon.net>
Subject: LL-L "Philosophy" 2007.04.15 (04) [D/E/German]

Actually, it reminds me of a series of radio advertisements for Netflix (a
company that rents DVDs through the mail). The ads are done like a quiz
show, with the host asking a couple of totally absurd questions that are
impossible to answer, but the "contestant" gets them right. The third
question is then something really easy about Netflix. The ad makes the point
that it is really easy to rent from Netflix.

Sample questions and answers from the ads:

What is the square root of orange? Turquoise.

If 5 is happy, what is 6? Disappointed.

Kevin Caldwell

From: "M.-L. Lessing" <marless at gmx.de >
Subject: LL-L "Philosophy" 2007.04.15 (03) [D/E]

 Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong wrote:

Q: Wat is het verschil tussen een dood vogeltje ? (What is the difference
between a dead bird?)

A: Zijn ene pootje is even lang. (Its one leg is of equal length)

 It reminds me of things one hears every day, like "the couple loved each
other" or "Europa hat sich miteinander ausgesöhnt". Two are needed for the
verb, but the subject is only one, containing a multitude. The difference in
the riddle is: Two are needed for the comparison, but the subject is only
one, containing only one -- one bird, one leg. Is the joke really philosophy
or just a satire on such phrases as the above?

Marlou
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From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Philosophy"

Beste Ron,

You wrote:

Jacqueline,

My first reaction was that it seemed like a koan (公案, Japanese kōan,
Mandarin gōngàn, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan), a puzzling type of question
("riddle"?) used in Zen Buddhism, mostly in the Rinzai (臨済, Mandarin Línjì)
school, in most cases to point out delusions of human perception.  If what
you quoted is in fact a koan, I'd venture to guess that it targets the
perception of duality.

Here we have a connection with Nasreddin Hoca again, who was also notably
proficient in pointing out such matters...and with Uilenspiegel in second
order if you wish. By the way, the very name "Uilen-spiegel" could roughly
be interpreted in two complementary ways in older Brabantish, meaning both
"your-mirror" (~ u-lie(de)n-spiegel) and "their-mirror" (~
hun-lie(de)n-spiegel) at the same time. Mmm, duality in the Lowlands: a far
cry from yin/yang? *s*.

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Traditions

Mark:

> Tell, why is Low German & Afrikaans humour so scatalogical?

Interesting questions, Mark.  Do I have my own theories.  You betcha I do!
;-)

You're dealing with satire, after all.  Let's see how the all-knowing
Wikipedia defines that:

Satire (from Latin satira, "medley, dish of colourful fruits") is a
technique used in drama, fiction, journalism, and occasionally in poetry,
the graphic arts, the performing arts and other media in which the artist or
author draws out societal or religious criticisms through use of other
literary devices. Although satire is usually witty, and often very funny,
the purpose of satire is not primarily humour but criticism of an event, an
individual or a group in a clever manner.

What we might want to add to this is the element of shock value, be it
subtle or abundantly palpable. So, according to my theory those features you
mentioned may point out the no-nos of time and place.

Ulenspeghel is from the late Middle Ages and from an almost solidly Roman
Catholic Europe (being prior to the Reformation).   At that time, average
people lived under deplorable conditions, with horrible food, each family or
groups of families in one-room houses (if they were relatively lucky)
together with animals, with no sanitation and no privacy, and death and
privation to be witnessed from earliest childhood.  Being overly prudish and
thin-skinned wouldn't have gotten you very far.  In contrast, the Church
held up images of pious purity and of the innate sinfulness of body and
sexuality, of "natural sin."  To point out purity and godliness you had to
contrast it with corruption and depravity, with "sin," even in religious
texts and their verbal and pictorial interpretations for the largely
illiterate, uneducated masses. You see lots of horrific and even offensive
depictions in late medieval paintings of purgatory for instance, and not
only in the Lowlands. Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516) shows us some late
impressions of this in his paintings. Carnival provided permission to
abandon many societal rules, and it is here that these traditions are
utilized to mock the establishment and the unthinking masses that follow
it.  Added to it are echoes of the danse macabre tradition, the tradition of
the "dance of death" that involves everyone from serf to pope, a
conveniently legitimate genre to let loose against the sanctimonious high
and mighty. Less than flattering characterizations of monks, nuns, bishops
and even popes were particularly popular with the masses, and this developed
into a ribald and scatological street comedy tradition that was solidly
based on satire. Scatology was something everyone could understand -- and
remember that many people didn't live beyond early adulthood when
scatological humor still holds some appeal. It was a convenient means of
flinging at the establishment that to which it scatology refers.  I do
believe there were different traditions in Germanic-speaking Europe that
allowed this to be expressed more clearly.  Please also bear in mind that
most of Germanic-speaking Europe was Christianized much later than most of
Romance-speaking Europe.

Ulenspeghel seems to have liked to target hierarchical conventions and lack
of critical thinking.  In the example I provided, this involved
"mud"-slinging at the conventional unquestioning reverence apprentices were
expected to have for their masters.

> Why is the middle Eastern Nasredin so political?

Sufi traditions (diverse as they are) existed and even now often still exist
on the periphery of Islam, oftentimes outside the legitimate range, and
tended to be barely tolerated or not tolerated at all.  Many believe that
Sufism didn't grow out of Islam but merely found a home in Islam and thus
developed with Islamic trappings.  Generally speaking, Sufism denotes mystic
traditions that emphasize spiritual cultivation and divine love. It tends to
scorn the institutionalization and intellectualization of faith. It rather
emphasizes each person's unique relationship with God. This relationship can
be intensified by various means, in many schools by means of ecstatic joy,
usually through poetry, music and dance, such as among the ("whirling")
dervishes of the Mehlevi school. Although this may not be totally à propos,
I'd liken it to Hassidism with its anti-academic, anti-establishment
tendency in seeking simple joy within the framework of Judaic faith. I have
been fortunate enough to spend a whole Sabbath among Hassidim and to attend
Mehlevi Sufi Sema celebrations, and I must say that I can see many striking
similarities. Scorning "stale" religious conventions and clerics' sway and
instead seeking divine intimacy and ecstasy are perhaps the most striking
similarities.  Just as Europe, the Middle East knew no separation between
religion and politics.  Sufism and some other movements tended to be
outside, be it as a matter of choice or as a matter of exclusion.  It
therefore does not come to me as a surprise that an anti-establishment,
political humor tradition developed among them.

Luc, I'm with you in seeing common threads with Zen.  That's pretty astute
of you.  In the above-mentioned traditions you seek enlightenment or at
least divine connections mostly through what to us seems like ecstasy, while
in Zen it tends to be through intensive moment-to-moment mindfulness and
"sitting" (i.e. meditation).  It all boils down to a common endeavor to seek
altered, alternative states of consciousness to bring out innate awareness
that is too simple for our intellects which is trained to look for
complexity -- the joy of the moment, the joy of just being, of just being
one with the Great Power without the "monkey mind"'s interfering
chattering.

Seemingly absurd, joke-like riddles and responses that are designed to shake
us out of our lazy dream state, the "predigested world ," seem to represent
a striking feature all these movements share.  However, the other traditions
allow mocking (i.e. satire), while the koan tradition does not (though it
causes us to question and even abandon conventional thinking).  I believe
that is because backbiting, put-downs and other expressions of resentment,
scorn and poking fun at people, have no place in Buddhism, certainly not in
Zen, which is based on the basic belief in complete interconnectedness and
the ultimate absence of "self," in a need to "save all transient beings" by
means of "loving kindness" (मैत्री maitrī) and "compassion" (करुणा karuṇā).
In this regard I personally find this tradition more similar to what I
perceive the mindset and endeavor of Jesus of Nazareth to be: make people,
any people, think and feel in new ways by challenging them, even startling
them, but not to the detriment of others ... because there are no "others"
... but there are stones and glass houses.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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