Mark Twain said it best, but then he said a lot of things best: "The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow." It is not prosperity and plenty that generate laughter but adversity, and the farmlands of America have been fertilized this past decade with such a generous maturing of adversity that the crop of humor has been a bumper one.
One Plains farmer complained that he was losing $200 with every truckload of grain that he took to market. But, he chuckled, he had found a possible solution to the problem - a bigger truck. Another was asked what he would do if he won $5 million in the lottery. He responded that he would just keep on farming - as long as the money lasted, anyway.
Pickup trucks with license plates from agricultural regions carry bumper stickers that echo the troubled laughter: "Warning: Farming may be hazardous to your wealth" and "Crime doesn't pay. But then neither does farming."
Troubles on the American farm are nothing new, of course, and neither is the laughter that accompanies such troubles. Even when economic conditions have been favorable, the weather has always remained beyond the control of man and government. Hail, grasshoppers, wind, drought, flood, late frosts, early frosts, heavy snows, no snows, whatever it is that can vex the farmer has always been there.
And whatever it is that has happened by way of perverse weather has found its way into the humor repertoire of the American farmer. Perhaps the most widely told tall tale in America from the middle of the nineteenth century right up to today has been the seasoned favorite about the time it was so hot that the popcorn popped right on the stalk. The narrator, after a studied pause, usually adds that two mules in the next field saw it on the ground, thought it was snow, and froze to death. This sequence won tall-tale contests throughout the 1920s and 1930s and is no less popular today.
Second on the all-time hit parade of meterological tall tales is almost certainly one at the other end of the scale - flood. One of this story's many variants has a pioneer finally walking into town after it becomes apparent to him that it may be another couple of months before his lane would be dry enough for him to drive out with his team and wagon. En route, he has to detour around a huge puddle, in which he spots a nice hat floating about. He stops, pulls in the hat with a stick, and finds that underneath the hat is...a head!
"Are you all right, stranger?" the farmer asks.
"All right?" answer the stranger, "Hell, I'm on horseback!"
The tradition of tall tales
If it was not one of the extremes of the climate that pioneer tall tales dealt with, it might be the abrupt juncture between two such extremes. A tale widely distributed across pioneer America told of the farmer who hurried home because he saw a storm approaching behind him. When he arrived home, he found that his dog, riding in the back of the wagon, had drowned while his team in front had remained perfectly dry.
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