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A Bumper Crop: How Midwestern Farmers Face Trials
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12200 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
4,262 Words |
| Author
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Roger L. Welsch
Plains folklorist Roger L. Welsch is professor of English and
anthropology at the University of Nebraska. |
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
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