There’s probably no one in Canada (pop: about 39 million) over the age of 10 who hasn’t heard a Newfie joke or at least doesn’t know what they are. If you’re from outside Canada, these are jokes which feature a Newfie (a less formal name for an inhabitant of the province than Newfoundlander) often as the butt of the joke, but not always (more about that later).
There are a huge number of compilations of Newfie jokes available in venues from the airport convenience store, to stores that sell Newfoundland memorabilia, and also in university libraries and other specialized collections especially for those compilations that are old or out of print.
I was 10 (and then older) growing up in Newfoundland in the late 1960s and the 1970s. As I recall, there wasn’t much competition for compilations of the jokes back then: the market seemed to be cornered by a series of short books (maybe 50 pages long) compiled by Bob Tulk. Each one was a simple list and with the occasional illustration of one of the jokes. They ranged wildly in tone: some were pretty lame, some were funny, some were very witty, a few were what we would call politically incorrect or unwoke these days. I think it’s safe to say that none of the jokes were complex in the sense that you couldn’t figure out the punchline.
I read many of those from front to back. I still remember—over 50 years later—some of the exact jokes, which is an indication both of my strong interest in comedy and humour even at an early age, but also of the zinginess of some of those jokes.
I’m now writing a book about Newfie jokes—not a compilation of jokes but rather a history of them, a categorization, an analysis, all of that—and I just started my research this past week with a visit to the Folklore and Language Archive at Memorial University in St. John’s. What a treasure that collection is! I mostly spent my first (of many to come) visit there looking at about 10 or so assignments that had been done by Memorial students in 1969 and 1970. Some of them simply presented in effect just a compilation of jokes, but other students went a little further and interviewed other students about their opinions of Newfie jokes in general. It all made for fascinating reading.
It’s hard to make any broad conclusions about these jokes based on just over an hour of research of course, but a few things stuck out—and these are things I am interested to see if they turn out to be accurate as I continue my work on the book:
1. The very earliest jokes I found are crude and a bit juvenile in their subject matter. One had to do with the Newfie liking to take a bath in sewage. For the record, I have nothing against crudeness and incorrectness in humour—the only criterion for humour is whether it is funny or not—and this joke, at least for me, didn’t satisfy that criterion. It had the feel of a comment that one guy in junior high school might say to another:
• “Jesus, man, when are you gonna get rid of those pimples on your face?”
• “Well, at least I don’t take a bath in shit every morning.”
2. Some of the jokes are not quote-unquote “original” Newfie jokes, in the sense that they simply substitute the Newfie in the same joke that featured some other group of people that the joke-teller wanted to make fun of. One of the term papers even referred to this fact about one of the jokes, saying they had heard the same one but about quote-unquote “Pollacks” (Polish people) instead of Newfies. This is likely a very common phenomenon in all sorts of jokes: you take the structure of a blonde joke, for example, and make it about gingers.
3. There were very few of the jokes that I had not heard before. That’s probably not surprising, since the term papers were written exactly during the time when I was growing up listening to them. One thing that did surprise me though was that there were some jokes that came up in more than one of the term papers. Again, especially in this case where I read a total of only about 50 jokes, it’s impossible to make firm conclusions, but it does hint at the possibility that maybe the total corpus of Newfie jokes in the late 1960s was not that huge. I will find out more as I research further.
Reading these jokes, I felt a bit transported back to when I was about 10 years old. Again with the caveat that these are very early days in my investigation, but two categories of jokes emerged:
1. The Newfie portrayed as stupid or slow-witted.
2. The Newfie portrayed as being perceived that way, but actually able to outsmart the Torontonian or whoever else was involved.
I look forward to more research to find more categories and examples, but also to discern the history and development of the jokes. One basic question I wonder about now, for example, is when did Newfie jokes first start appearing at all? If you don’t live in Canada (and, alas, even if you do) you may not know that Newfoundland is in fact that youngest province in the country: it became a province in 1949. Did the jokes start in the ’50s? Were there Newfie jokes before that, when Newfoundland was a colony of Great Britain?
And so it goes. This week I’ll be getting my head out of the details a bit, and looking for various sources that talk more broadly about the phenomenon of the Newfie joke. As they say here, Some fun, b’y.
