Why Don't Sheep Shrink When it Rains: A Further Collection of Photocopier Folklore

Folklore, April, 2002 by Christie Davies

By Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. xix 332 pp. 21.60 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 0-8156-0600-1

The photocopier and fax, and more recently e-mail and the Internet, have transformed the mode of transmission of folklore by supplementing oral transmission with mechanical and electronic means. These allow texts and pictures to circulate even faster, yet they are still folklore for they are anonymous in origin and exist in various and modified forms that can be catalogued as types. Like jokes in oral transmission, photocopy lore gets shaped and polished and edited according to context as it is moved from one site to another. Some items are relatively fixed and others are fickle.

These items are the raw material of Dundes and Pagter's book, which consists of a collection of 180 examples together with information about how, where and when they were collected, cross-references to comparable materials in the established folklore journals and literature, and a good deal of erudite and controversial comment and explanation. The material ranges from office politics to psychiatry, from existential musings to bestiality. This book contains all the folklore that is fit to print and some that is not. The latter is, of course, presented in a scholarly and tasteful way, though without any use of Latin translations. Dundes and Pagter are both entertaining and enlightening.

Access to photocopiers is easiest in offices (where a high and increasing proportion of the British and American workforce is now employed) and so it is hardly surprising that much of the material is generated in offices and is a comment on the nonsense of bureaucratic work; it may be circulated from person to person or may be found pinned up on office notice boards. Here is a typical example:

   ARE YOU LONELY?
   Hate to work on your own?
   Hate to make decisions?
   Then, hold a meeting!

   You can see other people, sleep in peace, off-load decisions, feel
   important
   and impress your colleagues.

   MEETINGS!
   THE PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE TO WORK.

Different versions of this were collected in the Wyoming Department of Commerce in 1994 and Syracuse University Press in 1995. They differ in verbal detail and in their visual illustrations and in Britain we are, of course, familiar with our own variants on it. As a comment, it is both true and funny--a modern proverbial wisdom. No doubt it will become (if it has not already become) the substance of greeting cards, bumper stickers and posters, but it originates in the people and is drawn from the imaginations of the harrowed white-collared toads beneath the bureaucratic cog who know only too well where each point goes. Folklore has shifted with the economy from rural and agricultural comment to urban and bureaucratic.

It is hardly surprising that many of these items have an aggressive feel to them, as in an item reported in San Francisco in 1996 that purports to be quotations from officer fitness reports on the form S206 used by the (British) Royal Navy and Marines:

   His men would follow him anywhere but only out of curiosity.

   This officer reminds me very much of a gyroscope--always spinning
   around at a
   frantic pace, but not really going anywhere.

   When he joined my ship, this officer was something of a granny;
   since then he
   has aged considerably.

It is to be doubted whether the Royal Navy is the real source of all (or even any) of these and they may have been originally ascribed by Americans to the Royal Marines in revenge for the Marines' burning in 1814 of Washington, D.C. and the U.S. President's residence, which afterwards is said to have been painted white to conceal the scorch marks. The items could have been generated by any military organisation. But it is the operators of photocopiers who have picked them up, collected them together and circulated them. They will probably eventually appear (if they have not already done so) in an armed services magazine or newsletter or a collection of one-liners, but they began as machine-distributed folklore.

Can there, then, be any secure limits to what is described as folklore? Dundes does not think so, for in his earlier book, Holy Writ as Oral Lit, he even treats the Bible as folklore. Fair enough, but is that the best way to regard it? I wonder whether it might not be better to look at some of the longer and more skilled and elaborated texts in this book as similar to a Bible scholar's search for authorship. An example would be "Honk if You Love Jesus," collected in Barboursville, Virginia in 1996, which is over 500 words long, very detailed and uses humour with great skill. It is the tale of a pious person whose bumper sticker displayed this message and who failed to drive away promptly when the lights changed, thus provoking great religious fervour. Might not the computer one day trace its authorship back to the secretly doubting Revd Doctor D. Morgan Rhys-Jenkins, B.A. (Llys), D.D. (Bob Jones University), Minister of Calfaria Hard Shell Baptist Church, Richmond, VA, by tracing the detail and referring back to his published sermons? If so, do we still classify it as a predominately communal creation? I may well be wrong and in any case none of this means that "Honk if You Love Jesus" is not in general circulation, is not editable to produce multiple variants, and is not worthy of inclusion in the book. No one will ever be able to sue the editors over copyright.