The “Farmer’s Daughter” is the shorthand designation for a class of American dirty, or obscene, jokes. Regardless of the version of the joke, the format is fairly standard. A traveler (most often a salesman) stops at a farmhouse one night for some reason (poor weather, tiredness, etc.) and asks the farmer if he may stay the night. The farmer agrees, but makes the traveler promise that he will not attempt to sleep with the farmer’s attractive young daughter, in some versions even going so far as to set up traps or barriers to prevent this act. Nevertheless, during the night, the traveler and the daughter sleep together (in some versions multiple times). In the morning, the farmer somehow discovers the deception, and the punch line is then delivered, either through the punishment and sexual humiliation of the traveler by the farmer, or through the humiliation of the farmer by the traveler tricking him and escaping punishment.
As researcher Jim Holt suggests, jokes constantly evolve, making their origins difficult to trace (Holt 2008, 50). Though the “Farmer’s Daughter” story might roughly correspond to jokes around the world that focus on the naïveté or foolishness of rustic persons, certain features of this joke are uniquely American. For example, the joke focuses on the traveler and not really on the farmer or his daughter, perhaps hinting at the importance of itinerancy in American culture. “Farmer’s Daughter” jokes are also closely associated with Ozark subculture, and in fact, some recognizable iterations of the “Farmer’s Daughter” joke have been in circulation in that part of the rural United States since at least 1900 (Randolph 1976, 38). Nevertheless, the “Farmer’s Daughter” jokes are common and well known outside of the Ozarks. One student of the genre, Cathy Lynn Preston, describes how jokes are culturally understood to be a distinct form of communication in which the performer and audience mutually agree that what is being communicated is untrue or is not genuine (Preston 1997, 471). Thus, jokes reveal much about the societies that tell them, including their anxieties, fears, and values. The longevity and popularity of the “Farmer’s Daughter” joke, in all its myriad versions, expose certain qualities about the American subconscious. Later, Preston writes that folklorists have illuminated the ways in which jokes allow cultures to form verbal and social proficiencies as well as how those cultures can use those proficiencies to challenge relationships to authority (Preston 1997, 472).
Erika K. Clowes draws parallels between “Farmer’s Daughter” jokes and the latency stage of psychological development, in which the individual is resolving the repression of the oedipal conflict (Clowes 1996, 439). She argues that the “Farmer’s Daughter” joke “serves the cultural function of transmitting information about taboos and appropriate social behavior,” also noting that cultural artifacts such as folklore convey information about those taboos (Clowes 1996, 449). Clowes notes that the known varieties of these jokes speak to one of three specific fantasies for the audience of the joke: the oedipal triumph, castration, or feminization (Clowes 1996, 439). Regardless of which variation of the joke is being told, the traveler is meant to be a stand-in for the narrator of the joke, the character with whom the listener is meant to relate. Read in such a way, the listener himself (or herself, though such jokes are stereotypically affiliated with males) is cast into an incestuous fantasy (Clowes 1996, 440). Clowes discusses the oedipal triumph as occurring in the versions of the joke where the traveler successfully figures out a way to circumvent whatever barriers the farmer has laid out to prevent the sexual act or otherwise deceive the farmer and escape all punishment. In these versions, the traveler might be seen as a prodigal son figure, with the farmer then acting as a father figure and the daughter as the mother. The farmer imposes the incest taboo, which the “son” then triumphantly breaks. In doing so, the traveler son has bested the farmer father, proving that he is the better man (Clowes 1996, 440–442).
The castration fantasy may be seen in the versions where the farmer catches the traveler committing the prohibited act, often as a result of setting a trap that sexually harms or humiliates the traveler, as if the farmer is anticipating the betrayal. By so punishing the traveler–son figure for his transgressions, the farmer is symbolically castrating him. This outcome stresses to the listener that it was right to resist the initial forbidden desire, and that severe punishment is thus deserved (Clowes 1996, 442–445). Finally, the feminization fantasy plays out in the versions of the joke where the farmer punishes the traveler through sexually aggressive acts involving elements of anal intercourse, thereby transforming the traveler into the feminine (Clowes 1996, 445–448). It should be noted that in many of these versions of the joke, the traveler does not necessarily find his punishment unpleasant or degrading.
An examination of the joke even at the broadest level reveals that it does indeed have elements of fantasy. For example, the nature of consent, or even sexual interest, on the part of the daughter is rarely broached in any version of the joke. Her presence in the house, her very presence in the joke itself, makes her a willing participant in whatever action happens next. In many versions of the joke, the daughter does not even have a speaking part. Her body is the field on which the joke’s first action is played. Another element of fantasy present in many versions of the joke is the degree of violence that is sanctioned, insofar as the teller and listener are concerned, within the world that the joke inhabits. The degree of sexual humiliation employed as punishment against the traveler in the various versions—vises, knives, fire, amputation, forced sodomy—are all things that would cripple or kill in real life, but as this is a joke, it is, of course, “funny,” and often there is no implication of lasting damage, nor is there any implication that the farmer will suffer any legal ramifications for inflicting such violence. Actions that would horrify in real life are meant to delight and titillate within the confines of the world of the joke.
The figure of the “Farmer’s Daughter” herself, in a less obscene form, is reflected throughout popular culture in the characters of Daisy Mae in the Li’l Abner comic strip, Ellie Mae in the Beverly Hillbillies TV show, Daisy Duke in the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, and in other places as well. Jan Peterson Roddy describes such characters as being “seen as closer to nature, the farmyard, and animals than her sub/urban cousins, but … always willing to entertain them with her sexual charms” (Roddy 2008, 40). The fact that the “Farmer’s Daughter” figure shows up so often in the popular imagination indicates her presence is meant to symbolize something to the audience, who are therefore assumed to have already encountered the figure before. That is, the audience is assumed to be familiar with the joke, and to understand what the presence of the “Farmer’s Daughter” means.
Holt states that folklorists have established that most jokes disseminated orally tend to be about sex and the “Farmer’s Daughter” is no exception (Holt 2008, 102). The joke’s longevity and the fact that it has so many renditions indicate that it speaks to something deeply held within the primal undercurrent of American thought. For this reason the joke will likely be a part of society for many years to come.
Sarah McHone-Chase
See also Betsey and the Mole Skin; Vaginal Serpent Theme; Women in Folklore
Further Reading
Clowes, Erika K. 1996. “Oedipal Themes in Latency: Analysis of the ‘Farmer’s Daughter’ Joke.” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 51: 436–454.
Holt, Jim. 2008. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. New York: W. W. Norton.
Preston, Cathy Lynn. 1997. “Joke.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, edited by Thomas A. Green, 471–475. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Randolph, Vance. 1976. Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Roddy, Jan Peterson. 2008. “Country-Queer: Reading & Rewriting Sexuality in Representations of the Hillbilly.” In At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries, Volume 53: Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza, 37–52. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi.