Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing: Still More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire

Humor in Life and Letters

by Alan Dundes, Carl R. Pagter

Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing documents the thriving folklore tradition that circulates in the workplace. Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter have collected more than two hundred and fifty "signs of the times"—the office memoranda, parodies, cartoons, and poems that daily make their way through copy machines, interoffice mail systems, and fax machines and are affixed to bulletin boards and water coolers. The rich vein of urban folklore tapped by this imaginative volume constitutes a great testament to one of the world's most prolific authors—anonymous.The popularity of the items featured in this timely book is apparent by their reproduction in mass or popular cultural form—as greeting cards, plaques, and bumper stickers—reminding us of the inevitable interplay between folklore and mass culture. Dundes and Pagter clearly demonstrate the existence of folklore in the modern urban technological world and refute the notion that folklore reflects only the past.

Genres: Folklore, Humor

433 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1991

About the author

Alan Dundes was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more. One of his most notable articles was called "Seeing is Believing" in which he indicated that Americans value the sense of sight more than the other senses.

Reviews

[Jon]

This is a collection of creative tidbits from the paper-age. Before your photoshops and youtubes, people would post their offensive/insane drawings on the office corkboard, and they were hilarious.

[Amanda Hosford]

Who doesn't love a good book about folklore?