Goats, Trolls, & Numbskulls A Middle School Lecture on Folklore Genres with Lise Lunge-Larsen Sample Preparation and ASL Interpretations by Doug Bowen-Bailey License Info | Table of Contents | Overview | Your Assignment | Preparation | English Lectures | Sample Interpretations | Transcripts of English Lectures | Interpreter Notes | Building Involvement in ASL | Credits

Transcript of Numbskulls Genre

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Another one that I think you also see a lot of today are the ones that are called uh, numbskull. Can you read my handwriting? That’s a “U” when I put that. Sometimes they’re called noodlehead stories, too. And they’re stories about people who think they’re kind of clever but they’re actually very, very stupid. And they get into one scrape after another. Because what they think is a clever idea turns out to be a really bad idea.

There’s this very famous Norwegian story about the man who was going to keep house, or another very famous, sometimes they’re called “Jack” tales, and in Latin America, they’re always stories about a character named Pedro, he’s always very...and in Germany he’s always called Hans, and in England, there’s a very funny story called The Three Sillies. And I don’t have time to tell you the whole story, but I’ll get you the general idea.

It’s about a young woman who’s being courted by this guy. And so her parents have him over for dinner, and they serve him this nice meal, but he runs out of beer. So she of course jumps up and says, let me refill this. So she takes the mug and goes down into the basement where they have a big keg, and she opens up the tap and puts the mug underneath, but it’s a very slow drip.

So she sits down on the stairs to wait. And she’s sitting there she’s kind of looking around, and she sees that there’s an axe stuck in the beam in the ceiling. And she goes, “(gasp) What if me and my sweetheart were to get married and what if we had a little child and that child was a little boy and what if he came down here one day to get some, you know, ale for his father, and what if the axe got loose from the ceiling and hit him in the head? It could kill him! Boo-hoo, … so she just starts bawling at the thought of what possibly could happen one day, and forgets to come upstairs with the beer.

So her mother wants to know what’s going on so she comes downstairs … “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?” And she says “I came down here and I’m noticing the axe stuck in the beam of the ceiling and thought what if me and my sweetheart get married and we have a little boy one day and he comes down here to fetch some beer for his father and what if the axe got loose from the ceiling, it could kill him!” And the mother says, (sob sob sob) “That’s terrible!” So then she starts crying too. These people are not too bright. (laughs)

So then of course the father comes down, and there’s his wife and there’s his daughter, there’s beer spilling all over the place, and then he goes, “What happened?” and he gets the whole story and goes (gasp) (sob sob) and he starts crying.

So now the sweetheart’s sitting all alone upstairs, you know, “where are they all?” so he goes downstairs to see what happened. And so they tell him this whole story and he cannot believe it. And he goes, “Oh my God, you three are the silliest people I’ve ever met in my life and I am leaving and I’m never coming back unless I meet three sillies sillier than the three of you are.” And he just storms out of the house, and of course, now they really fall to crying because the girl has lost her sweetheart.

But he goes off on his way, sort of shaking his head, and he comes to this farm. And he sees this very strange sight. There’s this farmer and he’s trying to push his cow up a ladder on to the sod roof. And he goes, “What are you doing?” And the farmer says, “Isn’t it obvious? There’s green grass right here on my roof. Why should I take the cow for a mile’s walk to the pasture when I could just put him up here on the roof?” said the man. “Uh, aren’t you afraid it’s going to fall off?”

“Not at all,” says the man. “I’m just going to tie rope around his neck, put it down the chimney, I’ll go inside, tie the other end of the rope to my leg, and I’ll go about doing my business.” Well, the man doesn’t think it’s so good, but he sort of waits around to see what happens. And after a couple of hours of shoving this poor cow up a ladder, he finally gets the cow up, ties the rope around his neck, drops it down the chimney, ties the other end to his, you know, and starts to cook and you know, meddle around, and of course it doesn’t last very long before the cow falls off the roof and there’s no gentle tug on the leg … instead the man goes flunk – shooting up the chimney, gets stuck, and would have in all likelihood suffocated up there, and the cow strangled, if the man hadn’t cut the rope and let them both fall down. So he just shakes his head and goes “That’s one big silly.”

And he walks on and finds and inn for the night. Well, it’s full, so he has to share the room with another man, which is fine, ‘cause he’s really tired, goes to bed, early the next morning, he wakes up, there’s this huge racket. He rubs his eyes and looks and here’s this guy, and he’s like, had his pair of pants hanging there, and he’s in his underwear, and he’s taking this running start, and he’s leaping trying to leap into the pants (crash – rip) and he can’t do it of course. Back and forth, back and forth, finally, the man says, what are you doing?

“You know, they’re such a complicated invention these kinds of pants. You know it takes me the better part of a morning to put them on, every single day.”

“Oh,” says the man, “I can’t believe this. Has it never occurred to you that you could sit down on your bed and just take the pants and put one leg in at a time and then stand up and pull them up?”

“Wow,” said the man. “That is brilliant. I never thought of that.” So you know, another big silly.

He gets to another town, and here the people are up in arms at the end of the day because they think the moon has fallen into a pond. Of course it’s just a reflection. When he tries to explain it, he gets chased out of town. So now he’s met more than three sillies sillier than the three at home, so he has got to go home and marry his sweetheart because he is a man of his word. But as to whether or not they were happy, that’s another tale to tell.

So that’s the kind of story that’s called a numbskull story. And I think there’s a lot of television shows … I just watched “Home Improvement” the other day and it struck me that “Home Improvement” is one numbskull tale. Can you think of any others? (Student Response) Tweety Bird’s a good example. (Student Response) Tom and Jerry, very good example. How about “The Simpsons”? That’s often that way. Any others? I think sometimes, that “Seinfeld,” especially George, ha ha! George has a lot of schemes that are just exactly like this, right? So there’s very many shows on television. Nearly all sitcoms have a lot of that kind of element in it.

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