About a hundred years ago, a dirty joke was making the rounds in Green Forest, Arkansas. It found a home in the brain of young Fred High, where it remained embedded for decades. In 1953, Fred got it out, dusted it off, and related it to the folklorist Vance Randolph, who promptly anthologized it. The joke, in Fred’s words, goes like this:
One time there was a pretty little girl that lived in the country, and she didn’t know much of anything. So then a sheep-herder come along, and he showed her his pecker. “What is that thing?” she says, and the boy told her it is called Jenkin-Horn. He was one of these fellows that always wears a buck-skin string round his waist for luck, and the girl thought Jenkin-Horn was strapped onto him.
The sheep-herder come around pretty often for a while, and that girl sure was crazy about Jenkin-Horn. One day the fellow says he is going to live somewheres out West. The girl didn’t care if he went or not, but she wanted him to leave Jenkin-Horn for her to play with. They had quite a tussle about it, and when he got on his horse the girl run after him a-hollering for Jenkin-Horn. Well, when they come to the ford a bass happened to jump just then, and she thought Jenkin-Horn had fell in the river. The sheep-herder rode on down the trail, but the girl didn’t pay him no mind.
Pretty soon a preacher come along, and he seen her a-crying and splashing around in the water. He asked her what is the matter, and she says Jenkin-Horn is lost. The preacher couldn’t make out what the girl meant, but Jenkin-Horn must be something mighty important, so he started to help her hunt for it. Pretty soon the preacher got his pants caught on a sycamore stub. And when the pants tore loose, the girl seen Jenkin-Horn sticking out between the preacher’s legs. “There it is!” she hollered. “You old thief, you’ve got Jenkin-Horn tied on you!”
At the end of the transcription in Randolph’s book, Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales (1954), an annotator helpfully points out that in other forms of this joke, “the seducer’s penis is given a variety of names—combing machine, frenolle, Jenkin-Horn.” The improbability of these options notwithstanding (combing machine?), what makes this joke funny is the wordplay made possible by the act of naming the, you know, Jenkin-Horn.
By introducing his innocent lover to Jenkin-Horn, the shepherd unwittingly brings a rival into the relationship. He also set up the punch line, since the preacher wouldn’t have helped the girl look for the...
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