My Mom Wrote Her Master’s Thesis on “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes”
I have been thinking about circles lately. They are round. They never end. You think that you are moving away from point A but you find it right next to point B. You did not go anywhere. Circles are much like life. You think you are traveling somewhere, but no matter how far you go you return to where you started.
Lots of things seem to be coming full circle these days. One of them has to do with the fact that his Fall I am returning to teach standup comedy at Yale University. I still can’t believe that I went to school there, let alone that I will be going back. Comedy is another circle. I have tried to quit standup comedy since I went to my first open mic in 1995. Obviously I have failed since now I am teaching it. But these circles could have more to do with my inability to try new things. I could just move to Spain and study Flamenco and never look back…but does life ever work out that way?
The big circles are things we have no control over. Our family, our genetic make-up, our origin stories…these are things from which you cannot run. No matter how hard you try, life sends you back to like a science fiction movie. You think, let’s beat the hell out of this town on this road….oh, hey, isn’t that the same 7-11 parking lot where we started?
This is how I felt when over the holidays my step father casually dropped that my mother’s masters thesis was on “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes”….”What?” I asked. What??????? Now I probably should have known this already given that this is my mother. But, in my defense, my mother a) never talked about her dissertation with me as an adult, despite how much she knew about my standup comedy “career” and b) when she went to get her Master’s degree I was about 12 or 13. At that point in time, I was busy with other things. With all the Wet n’ Wild eyeliner I had to first shoplift and then put onSo when I heard this news from my step-father, I was stopped in my tracks. You mean, my interest in comedy has something to do with my mother?!!
I remember her talking about her thesis advisor, famous folklorist who studied jokes, Alan Dundes, but like I said, I didn’t have time to learn about my mother’s cool passion projects.
A few weeks ago I posted the following on Threads: “My mom was born to Mexican migrant farm workers and was the first person in her family to go to college. She was a librarian and had a masters in folklore from UC Berkeley. She thought my interest in standup is koo koo (which it kinda is). Anyway, I just found out that her masters thesis was entitled, “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes” and my life has never made more sense.
This post went mini-viral and resulted in me posting a link to an excerpt from my mother’s full dissertation called, “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes.” I did feel sad at the amount of attention this post garnered and she is not around to see the fruits of her labor. I am not sure why she buried her dissertation, but she did become more pious in her old age. Whatever it was, her work is well-received, clearly important, original and she would have been so happy to know it is appreciated.
I felt pretty shocked to realize this connection to my mother’s interest…but then I READ THE ARTICLE. My mom writes about one of her “informants,” a woman in her late 50s who works at a candy store and loves to tell jokes of a sexual nature to her friends and co-workers. This woman is clearly my grandmother who worked at See’s candy for 20 years and was indeed a joke teller, or as we call it today, a STANDUP COMIC. Aside the fact that my grandmother’s sex life or interest in sex has never something I want to think about, what really stopped me in my tracks was the very fact that my grandmother…told jokes! She didn’t have a stage or a mic, but she did have an audience; her friends, coworkers, sisters, daughters and grandchildren. I do remember one day listening to her tell a joke in Spanish about farting. Now to be a female comic is to hear men say that “women aren’t funny.” Because I have internalized misogyny, I naturally assumed that any comedy gene I had came from the X chromosome or my father’s family, many of whom would do quite well on stage. But the fact that it came from my migrant farm-working Mexican grandmother who did not graduate high school and spent much of her life doing rote labor like picking cotton or dipping chocolate tells me that…well, that the patriarchy sucks. Also she was skilled smart and creative.
Here is a picture of her and my grandfather:
