Transcript of “Corny, and Jokes in Your Seed Catalogs”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Good morning, this is Jerry calling.
Hello, Jerry, where are you calling us from?
Paris, California.
Well, we’re glad to have you. What’s on your mind?
Corny.
How did that word come about?
The old term back in the days when radio was king, some of the programs were called corny, and I believe that still some of the programs are corny.
Yeah, corny is often defined as something that is unsophisticated or the kind of thing that is naive or it’s unurbane.
And urbane is a word that means appropriate for people who live in complex cities or who live a high-paced life in an urban area.
Yeah, I tend to associate it with humor.
Yeah.
Corny humor.
Yeah, corny humor.
So it’s interesting that you’re thinking about it in terms of old radio shows.
But absolutely, it’s still being used.
And corny goes back to at least the 1920s.
And it was used within the jazz community as well as in vaudeville and described early movies.
It described, obviously, film and radio.
But here’s what’s interesting, Jerry.
There were these seed catalogs.
So you would get these catalogs from these companies that would try to sell you seeds so that you could plant new varieties that supposedly had better yield.
They would grow.
Yeah, I’ve seen those.
Yeah.
And so in order to make them a little more entertaining, perhaps something that you would read in the outhouse, they would put jokes in them.
Maybe they would fill out the bottom of a column where there was a little bit of extra space.
And these jokes were pretty broad humor.
So when people talked about corny humor, this is what they were talking about, corn being in those seed catalogs.
But there was another aspect to it as well.
There were terms like cornfed and cornpone, which were also used in the entertainment industry to describe this type of humor.
So we had cornfed, cornpone, corny, cornball.
All of these terms related to corn referred to rural lifestyle and the simplicity of the humor of the people who had that rural lifestyle.
It was basically a put down to people in a rustic area, calling them provincial or rubes or unsophisticated.
And it wasn’t necessarily true.
It was just what the fancy people in the cities considered to be true.
As is always the case.
It’s always that conflict between rural and urban anywhere in the world.
So corn kind of stood in as this metaphor for the kind of humor that the people in the agrarian eras had.
Well, give us a corny joke, Grant.
So this is from the J.R. Ratkin and Sons illustrated catalog of seed corn from 1901.
And so this is how it starts.
And he stole the possum from you, said the judge.
Yes, sir.
And worse than that, he not only cooked it and ate it, but he picked his teeth right in front of me, too.
Oh, my God.
That is corny.
But a bump.
But there you go.
That’s the story of corny.
So it’s really kind of a put-down of the rural lifestyle and the rural sense of humor.
Jerry, we appreciate your calling and inciting some corny jokes.
And take care out there, all right?
Bye-bye.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
