If you are at all familiar with Roger Welsch as a writer, speaker, or television personality, you will not be surprised to learn that his latest book, Why I’m an Only Child and Other Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales, is very, very funny. Although he is wholly capable of serious scholarly work in the field of folklore—his Treasury of Nebraska Pioneer Folklore immediately springs to mind—Welsch’s name has become a by-word for prairie humor. Even his bibliography, featuring titles like Everything about Women I Learned from My Tractor and It’s Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See It from Here, advertises this fact.
Welsch’s name is also synonymous with Nebraska, as anyone familiar with his long-running segment on CBS Sunday Morning, “Postcards from Nebraska,” will remember. Welsch loves Nebraska as all Nebraskans I have ever known (including my father) love their home state. They love it with a tenacity I have seldom encountered in people from other regions (except perhaps the Southern Mountains). Something about the state—and, indeed, the Plains, in general—seems to inspire affection and loyalty. Perhaps it is because the hardships of living there created and still create bonds within communities, relationships that can be expressed in either tragic or comic—but seldom neutral—terms. Perhaps it is something about the landscape itself, which is far more varied and magical than many imagine—something that invites romantics to dream and pragmatists to see what they can make of it. Whatever it is, it has meant that over the years Welsch has plowed a very rich furrow in the folklore of the Cornhusker state, and this book offers yet more grist for his peculiarly Nebraskan mill.
The stories included in Why I’m an Only Child range from brief jokes and bons mots (including clever retorts) to longer anecdotes and personal experience narratives, and fall into a category Welsch calls “civil ribaldry,” a genre he defines as suggestive stories and speech that “border on the ribald, although remarkably subtly,” ultimately remaining “fit for general company either because the language is seemly or because the subject is so obscured that those for whom the stories are not suitable are unlikely to understand what they are about” (3). (They thus differ from the coarser, less subtle tales characteristic of, say, Vance Randolph’s collection of Ozarks bawdry, Pissing in the Snow.) The following is typical: The uncle of a friend of Welsch’s, along with another local, witnessed the first airplane to ever fly over the area. “The startled friend, with both feet firmly planted on the ground sputtered, ‘Why, Jim, look at that! It’s one of them mail planes!’ Uncle Jim drawled laconically, ‘Nah. Them’s just the wheels hangin’ down’” (51). Welsch’s wife, Linda, as it happens, specializes in the risqué retort. After announcing their upcoming wedding to his rural friends and neighbors and enduring a round of good-natured “suggestive male jesting” about former flames, Welsch boasted, “‘Yes. On April twenty-fifth there are going to be a lot of disappointed women in Nebraska.’ Whereupon Linda quietly added, ‘Sure hope I’m not one of them’” (41).
But the book is not merely a collection of funny stories. Welsch presents his material in thematic chapters, describing the communal or familial contexts of each category in a way that helps the reader understand how such stories came into existence, the kind of community contexts they thrive in, what functions they serve, and (for anyone who needs such explanations) just what makes them funny. Although also adept at presenting and analyzing the material culture, foodways, and music of the Plains, Welsch is first and foremost a storyteller, and that is where his principal focus as a folklorist lies. Therefore, in the course of the book, he explores the various relevant genres of folk narrative, including personal experience narratives, oral histories, and even urban (or “modern,” as he prefers to call them) legends, in terms of civil ribaldry. He also discusses non-narrative forms which he simply calls “folk poetry”—turns of phrase, metaphors, and similes, like the following gem: In the course of a discussion about the latest pregnancy of a girl who was “particularly popular with the young fellows” of the community, one of the locals asked rhetorically, “‘Who do you think the father of that baby is?’ To which Welsch’s friend Bumps Nieslon replied, ‘That’s like trying to guess which tooth on a buzz saw hits the board first’” (53).
Throughout the book, Welsch discusses folkloric concepts like traditionality, orality, and performance context—all highly relevant, since most of the civil ribaldry he reports arises in conversation. He emphasizes orality and longevity in tradition as markers for folklore a wee bit more than I would (creativity within tradition and the oral-literate spectrum being two of my own particular hobby-horses); but to be fair, he does recognize the interaction between tradition and the individual talent and discusses the concept in a chapter called “Thinking Fast” (58-65). I also think he’s a little quick to dismiss stories he considers too urban, technological, or contemporary from the genre; but he obviously recognizes that they share a certain something with the rural brand of ribaldry—and he also clearly enjoys them. However, the preponderance of the tales he includes in the book are indeed “largely rural and increasingly of the past”; and, according to such criteria, his material is mostly of a piece (80). Yet, if Welsch fears that the genre is waning, he also acknowledges that “all cultural forms rise and fall, change, disappear, reappear”; and, tipping his hat to purveyors of the slightly naughty story from Chaucer to Shakespeare to “communities where it has flourished and can still be found,” he concludes, “it too may fade before whatever new folk humor form arises” (189).
Welsch makes a case for the Plains as, if not having sole ownership of civil ribaldry, at least as having provided “especially fertile soil” for the genre, because like the Plains themselves this form of humor is “rural, agricultural, subtle, and civil” (23). I have heard plenty of this kind of humor in my own area (the Ozarks). But if Welsch wants to claim it as more characteristic of the Plains, I won’t protest his bias too much; as the daughter of a Nebraskan I have come to accept such bias as the Nebraskan’s birthright—and Welsch is nothing if not a Nebraskan.
In sum, this book is not only extremely entertaining; as a mostly informal but thoughtful exposition of folklore and in its explication of various traditional oral narrative genres, it would not be out of place in an introductory folklore or folk narrative course. Also—and not unimportantly in this day and age—many of the stories made me laugh out loud. Since I'm familiar with the writer, as a speaker, musician, and author of such gems as Shingling the Fog and Other Plains Lies, I knew I would enjoy it—but maybe not quite this much.
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[Review length: 1151 words • Review posted on September 20, 2016]