My Grandfather's Joke
My paternal grandfather grew up in West Virginia and he told a joke that blows Cheney's remark away like a Perazzi-Brescia 28-gauge taking down an unfortunate quail.
"The definition of a virgin in West Virginia," he quipped, "is a girl who can outrun her brothers."
West Virginia humor is just one more piece of the Americana we know and love, to be filed alongside Elvis impersonators, pork chops on sticks at the county fair and "honoring" people by making bobble-head dolls in their likeness. But I don't suppose the VP ought to engage in public WV-baiting even if he is retiring from politics and his over-under is close at hand. Some of the knee-jerk Victorian class may be offended.
Ewww, not sure I like the image that joke conjures up.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously...or, rather, non-seriously...West Virginia jokes are very big down here in NC. Like: "If you get 32 West Virginia women together, what have you got? A full set of teeth."
Diane ;)
To be sure, it's a pretty nasty joke. But my grandfather was a very kind and gentle man who played piano at church. In reflection, I think he told my mother the joke with kind of a dual purpose as an example of WV humor and to describe a real horrible reality. We tend to use ribald humor to talk about exetreme dysfunction and evil because we don't want to talk about it directly.
ReplyDeleteBut the problem nowadays is that political correctness dictates we're not allowed to discuss certain issues at all. It's OK to make a movie like "American Beauty" about how f'ed up everyone is in the suburbs, but you can't say anything about these poor mountain folk. Thanks been my experience at least. One time about 9 years ago I was out at a dinner with business colleagues and a middle-aged woman--an ardent Clinton supporter--started going on a rampage about how "there is nothing wrong with those people down there [in WV] !!! Those people are as good as anyone else!" I was thinking "calm down, sis, no one said they weren't." It was out of nowhere.
Of course there are other populations in which tiny percentages of offenders are a mandate to hurl the label of "systemic abuse".