OCR Document


 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS: 
RUDENESS AND DEFINING THE LINE BETWEEN  

CHILD AND ADULT  
DONNA M. LANCLOS 

A careful consideration of the uses of rude or "dirty" folklore on and off 
the playground is necessary, because it is around rude performance and 
references to rudeness by children that adults enact many of their 
expectations and desires for their children. Reactions to verbal "dirt" 
reveal both the construction of children in the minds of adults, and the 
reaction of children to that construction. They explore it, they resist it, 
and occasionally they attempt to enforce it amongst their peers. The 
reaction of adults to the forbidden words and actions of kids, whether or 
not they are their own children, in turn speaks to anxieties and 
expectations that adults have about children and, by association, the 
society of the future. 

This paper concerns the ways in which Belfast children used rude 
folklore to mark and question age categories among themselves on the 
playground. It is based on materials I collected during nine months of 
fieldwork, from 1996 into 1997, in five different Belfast primary 
schools: two Protestant/State schools (P.S.1 and P.S.2), two Catholic 
schools (C.S.1 and C.S.2) and one Integrated school (I.S.).1  In particular, 
I address the adult/child divide, the ways in which that separation is 
dependent upon Western constructions of Childhood, and furthermore, 
how folklore materials reveal children's awareness of and ambivalence 
toward the very label of Child. In working-class Northern Ireland, it 
seems to be particularly difficult to maintain a rigid split between adult 
and child, and both kids' and parents' awareness of this difficulty informs 
many of the apparent contradictions between standards of behavior 
within the schools, and those applied without. 

The folklore materials I focus on here are those that the kids 
themselves classified as "dirty" or "rude": especially those concerned 
with scatological or sexual words and situations. I found in the course of 
my research that children's use of rude materials, and corresponding 
adult reactions to and anticipation of that use, serves as a kind of 
flashpoint for the discussion and negotiation of definitions of what it is 
supposed to mean to be a child. Fundamental to this discussion, then, is a 
sense of what is meant by 



 

LANCLOS 

"dirty", and what it meant by childhood. Mary Douglas' description in 
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo 
of "dirt" as "matter out of place" is also crucial to this argument, as is 
Horace Beck's equation of the term "dirty" with forbidden or obscene 
folklore, in his Journal of American Folklore article "Say Something 
Dirty!" In this case, the "matter" in question consists of the sexual and 
scatological words and references. In Belfast, I and the children I met 
encountered two different "places" where particular sorts of "matter" 
were unwelcome, and therefore "dirty." The first place was institutional 
settings, in particular schools, which are permeated by generalized 
middleclass notions of propriety (notions which do not include the public 
references to sex or other bodily functions). The second place was that of 
the abstract notion of Childhood, also as defined by the middle-class, as 
a protected and (forcibly) innocent space ideally unsullied by forbidden, 
adult knowledge. 

While the vast majority of the kids I worked with in Belfast were 
from working-class backgrounds, in the course of their everyday lives 
they were in frequent contact with institutions such as schools and with 
conventional, middle-class notions of proper child-like behavior. In this 
they were like the adults in their lives, who are regularly forced to 
confront middle-class expectations of behavior in their encounters with 
government agencies, city center department stores, and so on. Most 
adults have long since learned the unspoken rules of conduct that 
determine when and where particular language and actions are and are 
not appropriate. Children are in the middle of their struggle to learn the 
contexts in which "rudeness" is allowed (or at least, tolerated), but are 
also embroiled in the struggle to understand what can easily be perceived 
as adult hypocrisy around such issues. Until the conventions are more 
clear to kids, they often see adult silencing and censoring as hypocritical: 
how can teachers forbid them to use the very same words they hear other 
adults using in the shops, or even at home? As they learn the nuances of 
rudeness, and the importance of context, the distinction between 
institutional, teacher-based behavior expectations, and the other 
everyday models they encounter outside of school becomes more clear, 
and kids become increasingly adept at interpreting and acting on 
contextual cues. 

However, one set of references are uniformly perceived, across class 
lines, as forbidden to children, and that is references to vio- 

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lence, especially sectarian violence. The association of rude, "dirty" 
language and violence is inherent in much of the folklore materials I 
collected in Belfast. I explore the implications of this connection towards 
the end of this paper. 

For the purposes of the analysis I present here, expectations of 
"proper" childlike behavior directly inform notions of what is "dirty" 
when said or done by a child. I will first address some of the theoretical 
discussions about the status of children in Western society, and the ways 
in which concerns about obscenity and children's use of same reflect 
both ideal constructions of Childhood, and the conflicts of reality with 
that ideal: the lived reality of children, and the reality of adults who care 
for and about them. I then turn to the various ways in which children in 
Belfast used obscenity and obscene folklore. Both the folklore texts and 
the contexts in which they were employed provide a complex com-
mentary on age roles, and especially on the children's perceptions of their 
own place within their rigidly age-graded society. 

A word on age-groups in Northern Irish schools 

Schoolchildren receive strong signals about the importance of age in 
separating themselves from each other in their everyday school practices. 
The class grouping in Northern Irish primary schools, as is the case in 
the rest of Britain, Ireland, the United States, and indeed most of the 
parts of the world that use the Western European model of schooling, are 
based on age ranges, so that P1 is four to five years old, P2 is five to six, 
P3 is six to seven, P4 is seven to eight, P5 is eight to nine, P6 is nine to 
ten, and P7 is ten to eleven. "P" stands for "Primary," so "P1" is 
pronounced "Pee one," and is short for "Primary Year One." Such 
institutional separation of age grades frequently translates into separation 
away from school: parents in the United States frequently use whether or 
not there are children the same age as their own as a factor in deciding 
whether to move into a particular neighborhood, and the children 
themselves can take on these age-grades as given, if they have enough 
people their own age around to maintain such separations. In 
neighborhoods or schools with low populations of children, however, the 
rigidity of the age-grades breaks down in favor of simply having 
someone to play with; this has been described in America by Marjorie 
Goodwin, in He-said-she-said, and Barrie Thorne in Gender Play. 

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In the Belfast schools in which I worked, even though children 
mixed with other age groups on the playgrounds, the mixing was 
controlled by the adults in the schools. For instance, at C.S.1, the 
teachers allowed the younger girls (P1—P4) to mix with the older girls 
(P5 through P7) for about ten minutes during their lunch break, but at the 
end of that time insisted that the younger children line up and go back 
into their classrooms. Resistance to mixing also came from the kids 
themselves, especially among groups close in age (e.g., P4s and P5s). 
This was the case when I saw P5s rejecting P4s who volunteered to play 
with them, something that happened at most populous schools in my 
sample: P.S.1, C.S.1 and C.S.2, and I.S. But if maintaining the rigid age-
grades meant that there wouldn't be enough players in a game, or simply 
that play wouldn't be very satisfying, they were quick to adjust, as was 
certainly the case outside of school in their home neighborhoods, where 
many age-mates might or might not share a street, but a wide range of 
ages would. 

Internal (that is, within the category of Child) age grade distinctions 
were most frequently maintained in the practice of play. That is, 
distinctions were made from one group through the exclusion of people 
from the game, or from overt declarations that "you don't know how to 
do it properly," a dismissal that resulted more often than not in the child 
retreating to the company of an age-mate, and playing with them. 
Distinctions of child from adult, while also exercised in physical practice 
(children ran around on the playground and played, adults supervised that 
play), was more frequently present in the performances of folklore 
materials, especially in rude rhymes, jokes, and songs, wherein children 
would not only mark the distinction, but would challenge and mock it. 

Regardless of internal divisions among the pupils at all of the 
schools, all were classified as "children" by the adults, including 
teachers, playground supervisors, classroom aides, and custodial staff 
While the divisions within the school of P7 from P4 were important, the 
constant status of "child," held by all pupils at the schools, and the 
behavior expectations implied in that label by the adults at the schools, 
permeated the everyday experiences of every child. 

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The Child as Innocent: Constructions of Childhood 

These behavior expectations are linked to broader Western (European 
and American) expectations of how children are supposed to act, by 
virtue of the fact that they are Children. Much has been written about the 
socio-cultural constructions of The Child, and Childhood, beginning in 
1962 with Philippe Aries' seminal volume Centuries of Childhood. In 
particular, the notion of a proper child as innocent, meek, protected, has 
been discussed as a particularly bourgeois and Western concept, but one 
that has become a conventional model, in this the end of the twentieth 
century, for what the behavior (if not the actual essence) of a child ought 
to be. Because the innocence of children can only be observed by adults 
through patterns of behavior, underlying assumptions about the true 
nature of The Child can vary, even within uniform expectations of 
behavior patterns. Therefore, while one parent may subscribe to the 
model that children are inherently bad, and must be taught to be good, 
and one parent may assume that children are inherently good, and learn 
to be bad from outside sources, both parents may still hold expectations 
of behavior that require outward appearances of goodness and 
innocence. In the end, it does not matter if the children curse inwardly, 
so long as they do not do it aloud, among adults, and so rupture the 
desired image of the child as innocent. 

Of course, Aries was not the first to discuss the culturally 
constructed nature of Childhood; Margaret Mead and Martha 
Wolfenstein explored that very issue in 1955, in their edited volume 
Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, as did Beatrice Whiting in her 
1963 work Six Cultures: Studies of Child-rearing. His discussion of a 
particularly protected, bourgeois notion of Childhood is important here, 
because it is this notion that Belfast children (and most children in the 
urban, Western European and American world's) regularly encounter in 
their everyday lives. This is not to say that this ideal model of the 
innocent and dependent child is accepted wholeheartedly, either by the 
children themselves, or by their parents. It is to say that this model has 
been generalized to such a degree that it has become the picture of what 
"should be normal," in Belfast and elsewhere, and so it must be 
confronted, 

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both in this theoretical discussion, as well as by the kids themselves. 
The epistemological move that Aries documents via social history, 

removing young people from the realm of everyday adult life and into a 
separate, protected Childhood, coincided in the nineteenth century with 
an invention of notions of obscenity and pornography that very explicitly 
constructed women as particularly susceptible to the corruptive 
influences of pornography, as has been discussed by the authors in Lynn 
Hunt's edited volume The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the 
Origins of Modernity. Women and children both were constructed as the 
vulnerable, and therefore needing protection from harm, including the 
potential harm of obscenity. It was not until 1977 in the U.S. that child 
pornography laws were in effect; in the face of women's rejection of 
male "protection," this is a striking parallel with the move from women 
being the "problem" informants in anthropology, as described by Edwin 
Ardener, to children being classified as the same.2 Some feminist 
theorists today define pornography as another form of violence, and if 
women and children must be protected from violence, then they must 
likewise be protected from pornography and obscenity. 

This is not to suggest that children (and women, and all others) 
should not be protected from sexual and other sorts of abuse. The fact 
that obscenity definitions include far more than just pornography, 
however, means that children's speech is regularly censored by well-
meaning adults who are afraid that children's familiarity with "dirty" 
materials will lead to familiarity with other, more dangerous and anti-
social realms, including violence. 

While in the Belfast city center, I would regularly observe women 
or men talking to friends, on buses, in taxis, or simply on the street, as if 
their child were not there, observing every act and listening to every 
word. The adults would often use words such as "fuck," "shite," "hell," –
words that children are simply not supposed to say, even if they know 
them. Even if these adults themselves do not punish their children for 
rudeness—I did observe some parents laughing indulgently at a "cheeky" 
child—some adults will, especially teachers and playground supervisors. 
Regardless of the individual model of childhood constructed within each 
family, then, the broader "societal" model will be encountered by chil 

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dren at regular intervals, and they will have to deal with the tension that 
ensues, between what they have observed to be true about adult 
behavior, and what is expected of "proper" children's behavior. 

Folklore and Definitions of the Obscene 

G. Legman, in his introductory essays to Sandra McCosh's Children's 
Humor: A Joke for Every Occasion, and Vance Randolph's Roll me in 
Your Arms: "Unprintable" Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, details with 
some dismay the long history of folklorists' struggle with obscene 
materials, of self-censorship and the censorship of informants, especially 
children, who produce obscene or even slightly off-color materials. It is 
telling that the censorship in print of children's lore begins in the 
seventeenth century, a time that Aries identifies as one of the most 
"plentiful" in the definition of Childhood as an innocent time apart from 
the adult world. During the late nineteenth century, when folklore was 
just beginning to be defined as a discipline, censorship of children's 
folklore was at its height, as evidenced by the production of what in 
1979 Legman called the "lily-pure" (xvii) collection by Lady Alice 
Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland 
published from 1894 to 1898. The Victorian sensibilities surrounding 
Childhood in turn continued to influence subsequent generations of 
folklorists, most notably Peter and Iona Opie, as evidenced in their 
works The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, and Childre’ s Games 
in Street and Playground. While the Opies' collections are undisputedly 
important contributions to the field of folklore collection, they dismiss 
scatological or sexual materials as only used by "ogre" or "savage" 
children, first in Lore and Language (95-96), and additionally in Iona 
Opie's People on the Playground (26). Such dismissal continued the 
tradition of normalizing "innocence" among children, and marking the 
display of any other kind of knowledge as pathological. 

Of course, Freud and those who were to follow the thinking in his 
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality wrote much to disrupt the 
Victorian hegemony of the innocence of the (middle-class) child, and 
there were folklorists influenced by his attempt to re-introduce the notion 
of childhood sexuality as normal, and 

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as requiring more study than silence.3 Martha Wolfenstein's Children’s 
Humor: A Psychological Approach is exemplary in its analytic approach 
to children's humor of all sorts, including the sexual and the scatological. 
Legman noted in 1979 that the number of folklorists actively collecting 
(and more importantly, finding publishers for) obscene materials from 
anyone, including children, had remained a steady trickle since the 
1930s, especially in the United States and Britain. Now, in the 1990s, 
one can with relative ease find published collections of children's 
obscene lore, for example, parts of Simon Bronner's American 
Children’s Lore, as well as Wendy Lowenstein's Shocking, Shocking, 
Shocking: The Improper Play Rhymes of Australian Children. Many of 
these published works lack analysis, and remain disembodied 
collections, with little sense of the purpose to which children would put 
such folklore. It should also be noted that many collections of obscene 
materials, both from children and adults, are the result of attempting to 
fill in the "holes" left by expurgated volumes printed earlier, as 
Randolph tried to do with his Ozark collections in Roll Me in Your Arms. 
With children's folklore, researchers are trying to balance the previous 
"lily-pure" picture given by earlier scholars, and in so doing produce 
volumes that actually exaggerate the existence of obscene children's lore 
in everyday practice. Publishing the materials in separate volumes 
highlights them in a way that is not true to the actual performance of the 
lore, which tends to be mixed, and highly dependent on intentions of 
performers, and context in which they are performing. 

Such exaggeration can feed the fears of adults who continue, as 
most do in the United States and Britain, to hold to at least some extent 
the now middle-class ideal of the good child as an innocent child, and a 
good childhood as one that shields children from inappropriate 
experiences and materials. Such an ideal has an impact regardless of the 
economic class, in that it tends to be the middle and upper class who 
make and enforce the rules, and when those rules pertain to children and 
child welfare, the middleclass ideal of innocence is imposed upon 
everyone. 

The censorship of children's folklore in print and in practice speaks 
as much to the adult need to protect themselves from the awareness that 
children are not and cannot be the ideal innocents so perfected in image 
by the Victorians. But as Michel Foucault 

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made clear with the case of sexuality, in The History of Sexuality, An 
Introduction: Volume 1, the silencing of the obscene (much of which 
was defined as such because of explicit references to sexuality, not 
coincidentally) in fact highlights its titillating appeal, for adults as well 
as children. 

The individuals defining materials as rude are the adults, and they 
make these definitions known by silencing or censuring children who are 
"dirty" within adult earshot.4 Children then take these definitions on 
amongst themselves, gasping in disbelief, disapproval, or (frequently) 
pleasure when one of their peers would come out with a joke or rhyme 
that, had adults heard, would elicit the usual adult response. This is a 
context-driven definition very much based on a "because we [the adults] 
say so" rationale regarding the nature of obscene materials. The 
bourgeois model of an innocent childhood could be seen in the 
expectations of many parents in Belfast, and in the precautions children 
took to make sure they were not caught being "improper" (and in the joy 
they took in disobeying the rules of propriety). It should be noted that 
what I am calling the Innocent Child model of behavior was not uniform, 
and was very dependent on class; children can be protected only insofar 
as the family can afford to, and if the child is needed for domestic work, 
such as childcare, doing the shopping, or even just taking care of 
themselves while their parents/grandparents are at work, then the adults 
are aware that children are more "exposed" by necessity, and are less 
uniformly condemnatory of obscenity and other "improper" behavior. In 
some cases, such behavior would be classed as "cheeky" or "bold" in a 
good way: the working class child needs that attitude to succeed in the 
economically and politically and socially hostile world outside (and 
sometimes even within) their own neighborhood/community.5 

Sandra McCosh noticed while collecting jokes in schools in 
England and America that teachers uniformly censored kids who asked if 
they could tell "rude" jokes, but for a variety of reasons. One teacher in 
Leeds simply asserted that the kids "shouldn't know any" rude jokes 
(75), while a teacher in San Francisco was afraid that once the kids 
started, they wouldn't stop telling dirty jokes. This idea that kids would 
become uncontrollable once they were allowed to express dirty materials 
speaks eloquently of broader 

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adult fears concerning the need to control children, and in particular the 
fear of the potential for "other" children to get out of control. "Other" 
children are those of the other, whether it be class or race-based 
distinctions of otherness; teachers in Belfast, and often in America and 
England, are frequently from a community other than the one in which 
they taught (although this is changing somewhat) and so do not see the 
children they taught or the children's parents as necessarily members of 
the same community that they, the teachers, belonged to. This fear of 
uncontrollably "dirty" kids implies that the slope from rudeness to 
outright obscenity and beyond is a slippery one, nearly impossible to 
escape once embarked upon. 

Additionally, these fears seem to point to an underlying assumption 
behind the Innocent Child model: if children are not made innocent 
through the efforts of adults around them, then they will become Bad 
Children, uncouth, antisocial, and even violent. There are, in fact, two 
related models of Childhood imbedded in Aries' discussion, and in 
contemporary popular concepts of the Child: the first, the innocent 
protected Child, is the ideal cleaved and aspired to, especially by those 
who can afford to shield their children from the "real world." It is 
incumbent on parents operating under this model to make sure their 
children are not exposed, or do not indulge in, behavior that does not fit 
this model of innocence. Therefore they censure kids who refer to sex or 
bodily functions, because they interpret such references as beginning the 
slide down the obscenity slope mentioned above. The second model, that 
of the uncontrollable, bad Child, is one frequently employed to discuss 
the problems with "other people's children." This is the case in many 
parts of the world with "street children" problems; the kids are 
stigmatized as inherently out of control and uncivilized, a contaminating 
influence on whoever they contact and wherever they live.6 These "bad 
children" are the logical result of not protecting children, as well as 
justification for protecting children in the first place. What is missing 
from these complementary models is any sense of middle ground, any 
feeling that kids could, for instance, use "bad words" and still be 
worthwhile members of society, let alone children.7 The fact is that kids, 
like most people, mix obscene, "bad" materials in with the rest of their 
everyday discourses. They just have to try and make sure they do it out 
of adult earshot, so as not to invite punishment. 

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Gender and Class in uses of Obscenity 

There are clearly class differences regarding rudeness and the ap-
propriateness of dirty words. The working-class parents I observed 
outside of school seemed to be more tolerant of cursing, so long as it 
wasn't directed at them, or seen to be intended as hurtful.  Intentionality 
was far more important than just the bare fact of cursing, and so 
standards of behavior as far as obscenity (in terms of words, anyway) 
were more contextual, less absolute in the "children should never say 
that" way. Standards about other kinds of unacceptable behavior, 
including making fart noises, potty talk, and sectarian language, were 
also situational. I saw some adults simply ignore such things, if they did 
not feel it was directed at them, or if they saw no real harm in the 
activities. I also saw some adults use that behavior as an excuse to come 
down on a child who "had it coming," who had been acting up in more 
innocuous ways, and who was perhaps getting on their nerves, and so the 
obscenity was the last straw, and the adult wasn't prepared to overlook it. 
It is a more flexible approach to obscenity among children, one which 
actually gives the kids some credit for being capable of knowing when it 
is and is not appropriate, and to some extent lessening the hypocrisy of 
those adults who do use obscene language in their everyday speech 
practices. It also acknowledges that one cannot control one's kids' speech 
all of the time, and that being selective about the battles one has with 
them conserves precious energy needed to spend on the real problems 
and pleasures of life. 

However, while it might have been more acceptable for the kids in 
the neighborhoods I was working in to be "obscene" by middle-class 
Belfast standards, it was still restricted by the potential for adult 
disapproval. Many kids were still learning and testing when and where 
they could get away with obscene language, in much the same way (and 
often at the same time) that they would test the limits of physical play, 
often dancing on the edge of verbal or physical violence, and sometimes 
going beyond it. When they did go beyond it, the kids were frequently 
pulled back, by peers as well as adults. Kids who were viciously physical 
or obscene with their peers were not played with as often, or were in-
teracted with cautiously, and not with abandon. 

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Kids might also, in their uses of obscene language and images, have 
been rebelling against the hypocrisy of adults who used those very same 
words and phrases, but attempted to prohibit children from doing so. 
Such prohibition from adults was very gendered; most of the censure I 
witnessed came from women, and furthermore, girls tended to be scolded 
for such language more so than boys. This speaks to particular 
constructions of the masculine in working-class Belfast, where it is not 
only expected but more acceptable that men would curse and be crude. 
This is not to say that women didn't similarly indulge, only that public 
perceptions of who could do so "acceptably" were strikingly split. This 
model is also particularly class-specific, where in the working class, it is 
more accepted that women do indulge in such behavior, while middle or 
upper-class women would not do so, for fear of seeming "lower class." 
Again, the ideal model of gender behavior is class-situated, so that even 
if working class women actually accept it far more amongst themselves, 
they are still aware of the abstract potential for censure from the middle 
and upper class establishment-whether or not they change their behavior 
because of the potential censure is an individual matter. 

One would also hear girls scold each other and their male peers, far 
more than boys ever would, for obscenity. In my experience, boys rarely 
threatened to tell an adult about a peer's obscene conduct, even if they 
were not friends. Younger boys (under the age of 6, for the most part), 
did appear to be more likely to report obscenity. I was frequently used in 
attempts to get others in trouble, when boys would run up and tell me 
"So and so said a bad word!" The minute I asked them (as I tried to do 
consistently), "Which one?" the tattlers knew I was a lost cause as an 
authority figure. Frequently they would start to say the word, and then 
catch themselves, shooting me a startled and cross look as they went in 
search of a more effective authority figure. Girls of all ages, on the other 
hand, would police each other far more vigilantly, even if sometimes it 
was only in play; they would threaten to tell, playfully, and so highlight 
the naughtiness of the just-uttered joke or word. 

Definitions of Dirt 

For the kids I met in Belfast, the awareness of potential adult censure 
was enough to make most uses of obscenity self-consciously 

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rebellious acts. The older kids, especially boys around the age of 
11, seemed to have a less self-conscious attitude towards cursing—while 
they were still very self-conscious about sexual matters. This may be 
related to the rather unself-conscious cursing that many adults in Belfast 
appeared to engage in, and could reflect the growing conception that the 
boys (and some girls) have of themselves as near-adults, even at the 
relatively young age of 11 or 12. 

What then counts as forbidden or rude materials? By whose 
standards are materials proclaimed as such, and do these definitions 
always hold true? In her collection of children's jokes in the U.K. and the 
U.S., Sandra McCosh included all "dirty or 'rude' jokes" under the 
analytic category of "sex, " which for her included "actual or implied 
reference to the physical relationship between men and women; parts of 
the body, both male and female; swear words or dirty words; and bodily 
functions, such as going to the toilet (75)." She based this definition on 
children's attitudes towards the joke, and I agree that this is the most 
effective way of ascertaining the level of rudeness that the kids are 
engaging in. If they perceive the materials to be forbidden, then they are. 
However circular that definition may be, it is certainly a relevant one to 
the kids, who know how to classify materials like jokes based on the 
reaction of those around them, including peers and adults. McCosh notes 
that the younger children, from about 6 to 8 years of age, she collected 
from tended to indulge more often in jokes concerning bodily functions, 
especially toilet jokes, while the older kids, starting at about 9 and for her 
sample, through the age of 12 or 13, tended to tell what she names 
"actual" sexual jokes. 

I define "dirty" materials, for the purposes of this discussion, as 
either language or subject matter considered by adults to be 
unacceptable, rude, or even wicked for children (and in some cases, 
depending on the social context, for adults). This includes curse words, 
the most popular of which were "fuck" and "shit," references to 
undergarments and sex, and references to other bodily functions, 
especially excretory ones. The materials were frequently marked by the 
kids themselves as "dirty," either in exclamations about another's joke 
("Oh, that's a dirty one!"), or in a warning phrase before a joke was told 
("This one's dirty"). Some of their "catches" played with the notion of 
"the dirty," especially the following: 

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Wanna hear a dirty joke?  
A man fell in the mud. 
Wanna hear a clean one?  
He got washed.8 

The above teases the audience with the teller's knowledge that his or her 
audience does want to hear the dirty joke, and then further teases with a 
very literal punchline. It indicates the teller's knowledge of the attraction 
of truly dirty materials, both for him or herself, as well as for their 
audience. 

My consideration of rude materials on the playground is one that I 
hope makes clear the integral nature of materials considered improper or 
forbidden by adults within the traditions of children. They use "dirt" in 
very measured ways, for very particular purposes, and not simply 
because they know adults don't want them to-although that is certainly 
part of it. 

At what point do materials used by children cease, if ever, to 
become dirty, and segue into the realm of acceptable? It is possible that 
such materials, because the joy taken in expressing them is so tied to the 
awareness of an abstract adult disapproval, that it would be singularly 
dissatisfying to ever move rude materials into the realm of the 
acceptable.9 Their very forbidden nature is what makes the jokes, 
rhymes, and isolated words and exclamations, so very attractive, and so 
particularly useful as well. In some cases, they were used to mark and 
question my own status. I encountered most such marking early in my 
field season, when I was still being introduced to the students, and when 
they were still unsure about my status on their playgrounds. I was, 
clearly, not a "kid", not one of them. So was I a supervisor? Was I a 
teacher? If I was none of those, what was I, anyway? In addition to 
direct questions—of which there were many—the children at all of the 
schools tended to employ jokes and very measured uses of rudeness as a 
way of gauging my status. 

Concealing Dirt in the Schools 

The sensitivity of the kids to their uses of dirty materials may in fact be 
far more related to their awareness of the requirements of the 
institutional setting (the school), rather than their adherence to some far 
more abstract notion of innocence perpetuated by 

20 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

middle-class notions of a proper childhood. The two are not unrelated, 
however, as the schools' ethos, especially surrounding that of the place of 
children in society, is directly informed by such middle-class notions, 
regardless of the class identity of the kids within the school. One game 
perfectly mocked this sense of propriety: at both C.S.2 and I.S. I 
observed kids playing "Sorry," wherein the players deliberately run into 
each other, almost but not quite knocking other players over. Each time 
they knock into someone, the players call, "Sorry!"—often in whining, 
insincere tones of voice.10 The message of the game appeared to be that 
so long as one held to social conventions and appearances, however 
insincerely, one's rude, actual behavior could become acceptable. 

As with the rigidity of gender separation on the playground, 
described in Barrie Thorne's Gender Play as well as in Derek Van 
Rheenen's article "Boys Who Play Hopscotch," the apparently strict 
awareness of what is "proper" behavior on the playground may fade once 
off school grounds, both among kids on their own, as well as among kids 
and parents. This would go a long way towards explaining why, away 
from school, I witnessed parents tolerating and even encouraging some 
kinds of language and behavior that on the playground was instantly 
censured. The parents were aware of what was "proper" for particular 
contexts, and were enforcing this sense of propriety when appropriate. In 
many cases, kids who violated that propriety on the playground did not 
do so out of ignorance, but rather did so in a very deliberate and calcu-
lated way, as a part of their continuing evaluation of the loyalty of their 
peers, and of the actual rigidity of the boundary that separated the 
acceptable behavior of adult and child.11 

One strategy for walking that fine behavioral line was the use of 
several different versions of the same rhyme within a given child's 
repertoire. Most notably, the knowledge and use of a "G-rated" version 
in place of an "R-rated" version allows reference to the forbidden 
material without actually saying it. Some 6 and 7 year old girls at C.S.2 
gave me this counting out rhyme: 

Ip Dip12 
Dog Shit 
You aren't on It 
Everyone But You 
You aren't on It 

21 



 

LANCLOS 

But one girl at C.S.1 had a censored version that still allowed her to 
indulge in the imagery of dog excrement, without saying a completely 
forbidden word: 

Ip Dip, Dog's Dirt [etc.]. 

A cognate, and much milder version of the two rhymes above, 
also collected from C.S.2, went as follows:  

Ip Dip Dip 
My little ship 
Sailed down the alleyway 
And you aren't On It 

This last version was used quite frequently, especially during the early 
months of my fieldwork, and I continued to collect it at the larger 
schools, especially I.S., where not all of the kids knew me well, or were 
very comfortable in my presence. The rude versions were said in 
situations where either the kids did not know I was around (in which 
case they acted horrified when they realized I'd just taped them), or knew 
me well enough not to care that I was hearing them say those words. For 
example, at P.S.2, two five-year old girls counted out to "Ip Dip Dog 
Shit," but while I was listening, the first time they did it, the girl doing 
the counting out simply fell silent at the place where the dirty word 
belonged. After the first rendition, she actually said the word "shit," 
perhaps confident in my lack of censure after the first round.13 

Some counting out is done in complete silence, with the child doing 
the counting out saying the rhyme to themselves as the rest of them 
count along, keeping track of who should be out. You can tell that the 
others do keep track, because occasionally there would be disputes about 
who should "really" be out. The "silent performance" of a counting out 
rhyme allows for "closet" rudeness, where all know that the forbidden 
rhyme is being used, because it is "called" beforehand (e.g., "Ip Dip!"), 
and so can enjoy the knowledge that they are violating adult interdictions 
even while they are protected by their overt silence. 

22 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

Among the Peer Group: 
Rudeness as a Means of Testing Loyalty 

As I witnessed this process of assessing tolerance for the forbidden as 
applied to me, I began to realize that they applied this to each other, as 
well. Kids regularly used rude materials as a sort of test, not just of me, 
but of their peers, as a way of determining who was more loyal to their 
friends, and to children's notions of conduct and propriety, than to 
abstract adult standards of same. 

Many issues of belonging and identity are invested in who one's age 
mates are, and how loyal they are. Loyalty to friends is expressed in a 
variety of ways, including tolerating (and not interrupting) particular 
jokes, or, alternately, tolerating someone's interruption of their joke, and 
even accepting corrections (or at least, accommodating them). It is also 
expressed in a toleration of rudeness, and very specifically, in not 
reporting it to adults in authority. In telling me dirty jokes (starting at a 
low level and progressing a higher level), they were assessing my 
trustworthiness, and therefore my eligibility to be included in some way 
in the group. 

For instance, invariably, at every school, the first even slightly-off 
color joke I was told was the following: 

Knock knock 
[who's there?] 
Bear 
[bear who?] 
Bare bum! 

Generally this joke would come after one or two "why did the x cross the 
road" jokes, or some other equally innocuous piece. My reaction to the 
"bare bum" joke was inevitably closely scrutinized, and when I 
encouraged them to tell more, the kids would usually continue, not 
necessarily immediately following with an even more off-color joke, but 
usually throwing one or two into the subsequent mix. 

And no wonder they were curious how I would react. The joke is 
actually quite provocative. One P4 girl at C.S.1 followed her 
performance of "bare bum" with: 

23 



 

LANCLOS 

Knock knock 
[who's there?] 
Bear 
[bear who?] 
Bare Clare! 

In making herself bare as a part of the punchline, Clare revealed, so to 
speak, that the bum in the original joke is not just anyone's behind, but is 
in fact that of the joke-teller. The joke allows the teller to (in American 
argot) "moon" the listener without actually doing so, a masterful 
substitution of words for action.14 

They did the same among their peers. In a "joking relationship," as 
traditionally defined by anthropologists,15 individuals tolerate 
impropriety within the frame of play, as defined by Gregory Bateson, as 
an expression of trust. While peer groups were predominantly age 
groups, they were also cross-cut by gender. Therefore, if a girl wanted to 
emphasize her difference from boys, she might exaggeratedly 
disapprove of their fart jokes as "disgusting." If she wanted to emphasize 
how much older she was than a group of boys and girls, she might do the 
same; or, she might even bewilder or impress them by upping the ante 
from toilet humor to sexual references. 

Sometimes the testing incorporated a catch question as well as some 
kind of dirty reference. For instance, an ll-year old boy at P.S.2 asked 
me: 

What do you call a wee man made out of cement?  
A wee hard man 

He then moved on to: 

Knock Knock  
DML: Who's there? 
Bear 
DML: Bear who? 
Bare bum. [giggles] 

And for the finale: 

Guess what? 
DML: What? 
You guessed 

24 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

As I was laughing, the boy exclaimed, "This is cracker!" meaning, "this 
is great," and I tried to get him to say even more jokes by telling him I 
knew he was "full of them." The above exchange shows him testing me, 
seeing how I will react to the mild dirtiness of the bare bum joke and 
then catching me with the "you guessed" joke. He shows his pleasure 
with "this is cracker," which might be an indication that he's pleased 
with my positive reaction, or lack of a negative one; I laughed, rather 
than scolding him for tricking me, or for mentioning bare bums. 

Catch questions like "Guess What" were frequently used by boys to 
mark the boundary of an in-group from an out-group.16 The person 
caught in the catch is made to appear to say, do, or be something 
embarrassing. Those who fall for the catch could be: 1) not in the age 
group of the person executing the catch, 2) not in the peer group of the 
person executing the catch, or 3) actually in the peer group, but the 
person "catching" you is "only messing," and in so doing, is emphasizing 
your friendship. The third option is seldom the case, because if you are 
firmly a member, you do not fall for the catch-primarily because it is not 
done to you in the first place. A more likely scenario is that you learn the 
catch from witnessing a member of your in-group doing it to a non-
member. 

Children's rules for appropriate behavior-much like those 
employed among adults-are not hard and fast, but rather are guidelines 
that allow kids to use language in fluid, complex ways to suit their own 
purposes, and not just that of the adults in their world. It is because the 
rules are variable and context-dependent that kids relied on a "testing" 
strategy to evaluate a person's trustworthiness. In my experience, 
children would seldom come right out and be rude first thing. They went, 
as a rule, through very measured stages of evaluation, observing my 
reaction to mildly risqué material before escalating to something more 
explicit. For instance, "Cinderella" was an immensely popular skipping 
rhyme at P.S.1, and the versions I invariably heard on the playground 
were some variety of: 

Cinderella 
Dressed in Yellow 
Went upstairs to see her fellow  
How many kisses did she give him? 
1,2,3 

25 



 

LANCLOS 

This was an extremely popular rhyme, not least in part because of 
the reference to kissing, which is assumed to be engaged in by the 
skipper. The more skips the skipper successfully carries out, the more 
kisses she "gives," making the truly skilled skippers into extremely 
experienced "kissers" in one fell swoop. The embarrassment of being a 
"kisser" thus tempers the joy in skipping, and might even discourage 
some skippers from monopolizing the rope. Those waiting their turn to 
skip frequently sing along, which allows them to enjoy the potential 
discomfort of the current skipper/kisser. 

One day, a couple of months into my field season, I was taping the a 
group of P5 girls "cold," that is, taping them singing without them 
skipping, and one girl, Amy, led the group into the following version: 

Cinderella Dressed in Yellow  
Went upstairs to Kiss her Fellow 
When she came down 
Her knickers Busted 
How many people were disgusted 

I had never heard this version before, but the rest of the girls clearly had, 
and were initially quite giggly and nervous that Amy had chosen to sing 
it for me. I asked them to repeat it for the tape, however, and with that all 
of the girls chipped in singing, quite loudly.17 The sexual nature of 
Cinderella's actions (resulting in her "knickers busting") was what both 
attracted the girls to the rhyme and made it such a risky thing to chant in 
the presence of a real adult—that is, one who would punish them for 
uttering it in the first place. While I did have that potential power, I had 
never exercised it. I had successfully made the transition, distancing 
myself from "'real" adults, and becoming a fit, potentially appreciative 
audience for the rhyme. 

Much later in the year, at I.S., a small group of P3 girls were 
skipping, and one girl in particular, Kira, insisted that I record the 
following version of Cinderella. I had already recorded the "usual" 
version, the first one listed above, many times at this school. 

Cinderella Dressed in Blue18 
went upstairs to do a poo 

26 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

how many poos did she do? 
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 

These much younger girls had hit upon a particularly rich vein of adult 
disapproval—any mention of excretory functions, in particular "doing a 
poo," but also including farting, or making fart noises. The girls who 
chanted this rhyme were particularly pleased that Kira managed to skip 
as high as twenty times, maximizing the number of "poos" they could 
refer to in the rhyme. Notice as well that the obscenity for the younger 
children, in this case about six years old, concerned excretory functions, 
while the older children, eight or nine years for the ones who sang the 
"knickers busted" version, are using sexual images. 

Where there was no gradual buildup to outright dirtiness, it was 
because I asked for it first thing. The only time I did this in my fieldwork 
was when I specified to the kids that I wanted "rude Christmas carols." 
These were almost inevitably parodies of Jingle Bells,19 and I had 
discovered that if I did not specify that I wanted the rude ones, that I 
would be left with several minutes worth of the regular Christmas carol 
on my tapes. Direct inquiry yielded songs such as the following, from 
I.S. 

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells 
Joker smells a thousand miles away  
He let a fart 
Behind the cart 
And blew up the IRA. 

This is rude not only because of the mention of farting, but also because 
of the reference to the IRA. I collected this Christmas parody from 
Protestant, Catholic, and Integrated school pupils, all of whom appeared 
delighted to be singing about farting and blowing up the IRA, a lethally 
funny combination of forbidden subjects: bodily functions and sectarian 
violence. Children were not supposed to mention the paramilitary 
organizations around adults, and were often shushed for doing so in my 
presence. After that rendition, which is a combination of the parody 
involving Batman and the one involving Santa Claus, several kids20 
remembered that they knew that one, so I got a group version: 

27 



 

LANCLOS 

Jingle Bells 
Santa Smells 
A hundred miles away  
Let a fart 
Behind the cart 
And blew up the IRA—Ho! 

Similar stuff was to be had at C.S.2, from some of the older girls, 
ranging in age from 9 to 11: 

Jingle Bells 
Santa smells 
A thousand miles away 
Let a fart 
Behind the cart 
And blew up the IRA! 

The only non-Jingle Bells parody I collected was the following, from 
C.S.2, sung right after a version of "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells," and 
was probably inspired by the reference to farting: 

The Addams Family started21 
When Uncle Fester farted 
He farted through the keyhole 
And 
Par-al-ysed the cat 
The cat got all excited 
And shouted, "Man United"22 
And Man United Shouted 
"The Addams Family!" 
Duh deh deh DEH 
thpph thppph[two farting noises] 
Duh deh deh DEH 
thpph thppph[mad giggling at all this farting noise] 
Duh deh deh DEH 
Duh deh deh DEH 
Duh deh deh DEH 
thpph thppph 

Much could be said here about the image of Uncle Fester "starting" 
the family by farting, reminiscent of Freudian theories of male 
appropriation of birth through images of defecation, as 

28 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

has been discussed by Alan Dundes in his article "Couvade in Genesis," 
but in this particular performance of the rude song, what were clearly 
most important at the time were all of the farting noises, which inspired 
gales of giggles and laughter, and were so much fun that the girls had no 
hesitation at all in repeating the song for me, so that I might capture it on 
tape. Once it was recorded, the girls insisted that I play it back for them, 
and they thoroughly enjoyed hearing—and occasionally sang along 
with—their voices on tape. 

At C.S.1 I frequently held "recording sessions" with a particular 
group of P4 girls who, once they figured out I wanted to hear from them, 
were happy to provide me with materials. The girls would crowd around 
me and my tape recorder, and would often simply sing or chant the 
rhymes. It was evident that it was far easier for them to remember the 
words to counting out and clapping rhymes if they were actually doing 
the counting out or clapping, and so I would encourage them to "say it 
like you're doing it," if their memory failed them as I was taping them 
"cold." A series of materials they gave me in November, still fairly early 
in my field season, began with a counting out rhyme containing no 
risqué material. 

One potato, two potato, three potato four23  
five potato, six potato, seven potato more  
[This] spud's OUT! 

The next volunteer ("Can I say one?") proceeded to a rhyme wherein the 
main character has her "knickers [underwear] in the air and her jumper 
[sweater] inside out," suggesting improper if not outright obscene 
behavior. The performer initially forgot how the entire rhyme goes, but 
clearly remembers the important part, that of the knickers being in the 
air. A nearby friend took over the recitation of the rhyme. For these girls, 
the part of the rhyme that made them giggle appeared to be the very 
mention of the word "knickers," and not so much the implied situation 
that would have resulted in the knickers being in the air in the first place. 
Again, the mere mention of bodies, especially those improperly exposed, 
or engaged in private and often gross functions, was plenty amusing for 
these younger children. 

29 



 

LANCLOS 

There is a party on the hill 
would you like to come? 
[Yes] 
{pause}. . . with your knickers in the air. . . 
{interruption} [No!] 
{someone else takes over} 
There's a party on the hill 
would you like to come? 
[Yes] 
Who's your very best chum? 
[Martina] 
Martina will be there 
with her knickers in the air 
and her jumper in-side- OUT24 

A series of knock knock jokes was started at this point, and towards the 
end, one girl then told the following knock knock joke. 

Knock Knock 
[who's there?] 
Paddy 
[Paddy Who?] 
Paddy Irishman 

This joke signals a whole new turn in the joke telling, which led to a 
series of Paddy jokes, three in all They go from mild to rude, with the 
last one actually having the word "shit" in it. A different girl starts the 
series with a Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman and Paddy Scotsman 
joke: 

Paddy Irishman, Paddy Scottishman and Paddy Englishman were 
in this big haunted house. And they were starving, and Paddy 
Irishman went down intil the kitchen, and he—he went til the 
cupboards and he got a cup of tea, right, and he was looking in 
the fridge and he sees a big thick slice in the fridge and he…and 
he hears this voice, {makes her voice deep} "I told you once I 
told you twice I told you thirty times not to eat that thick slice." 

This is an unfinished joke, cognate with several others I collected 
involving a ghost protecting something, usually food or money, that the 
various characters want.25 The last character to go in and 

30 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

try for the object is usually the one to get it. This joke speaks to a desire 
to ignore edicts about what you can and cannot have-adult restrictions 
on children's desires-and allows for that desire to be satisfied within the 
joke, with the usual punch line allowing the final protagonist to get away 
with the desired object. In this version of the joke, however, the teller 
leaves us with the edict "not to eat that thick slice" unchallenged by any 
of the characters, perhaps indicating less conviction about the possibility 
of defying such a command from a figure of authority. 

Another girl joined in the session with the following contribution: 

Paddy Englishman Paddy Scotchman and Paddy Irishman were 
all in a haunted house and they brought guns and that and they 
heard somebody go "Whoooo Whoooo!" And one of them 
shooting and banged the door open and went and knocked the 
door in 'hi the toilet and there's a wee girl in there picking her 
nose going, "Whooo Whoooo!" [the teller mimics the blissful 
smile the girl in the joke would have had].26 

This joke maintains the thematic thread of the "Three Paddys in a 
Haunted House," but introduces the mention of a rude action—picking 
one's nose, and furthermore, enjoying it. The girl telling the joke was 
explicit both in tone of voice and in expression that the girl in the joke 
was having a wonderful time both picking her nose, and perhaps in 
scaring the three (adult) Paddys, who were probably expecting a ghost. 

The end of this short session was the following: 

Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman, and Paddy Scotchman were 
all on this flying carpet, right? Whatever they wished for they 
got. And Paddy Irishman wished for a pot. . . Paddy Englishman 
[she gets help here—"Wished for a pot of gold!" teller says "No," 
the corrector says, "He did!" So I say to let her tell the joke her 
way for now.] Paddy Englishman wished for a big thing of. . . 
you know. . . pot of [corrector says, "Money!"]. . . GOLD. Paddy 
Scotchman wished for a big bottle of Scotch. And Paddy 
Irishman, didn't know what to wish for, and he tripped and said, 
"Shit" and landed in a big pile of shit." 

31 



 

LANCLOS 

The theme has shifted again here; this is still a Paddy joke, but it 
belongs to the set of jokes involving wishes27 The joke was hurriedly 
told, and to some extent "by committee," with help from the audience, 
indicating a desire to get to the punchline, which contains not only the 
word "shit," twice, but the terribly funny image of Paddy Irishman 
landing in a big pile of it. Not only does the joke itself violate adult 
standards of proper children's conduct, but the image of landing in a pile 
of shit runs rather contrary to adult admonitions, regularly heard on the 
playground, not to get dirty, to be careful with one's clothes, etc. These 
jokes were told in November, and while it rains frequently throughout 
the year in Northern Ireland, it is particularly rainy in the winter, and 
supervisors at this school and at others had been particularly vigilant 
about not letting the students into the grassy areas near the playgrounds, 
so that they would not get muddy. 

This was a very long session, involving rhymes, jokes, and songs, 
and I had been extremely careful not to act shocked or disapproving of 
any of the materials they gave me, so as to make the girls feel at ease. 
Just as the bell was about to ring for them to return to class, some of the 
girls wanted to give me "A funny song," and a large group of them sang 
very loudly: 

Mummy Mummy Mummy!  
There's something in my nappie  
It's big and brown 
I can't sit down 
And if I sit and squash it 
You will have to wash it 
It's not a joke 
The washing machine's broke  
There is no soap 
My dolly's head's broke. 

This song is funny because of the reference to shit-filled diapers, the 
"big and brown" "something in my nappie." It is also an exercise in 
control, with the child, in the nappie, lording over the mother the fact 
that "if I sit and squash it, you will have to wash it." The seriousness of 
that threat is exacerbated by the apparent poverty, or at least temporary 
down and out status, of their situation. "The washing machine's broke, 
there is no soap, my dolly's 

32 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

head's broke" can be read not just as a statement of the way things are, 
but as a protest by the child of the conditions in which she has to live. 
She is clearly blaming the parent-in this case, the mother-for the 
situation, and is threatening to make it worse if it doesn't get better. 

The issues of control over adults implicit in the text of this song 
were accompanied by the sense of control that the girls were clearly 
reveling in while they were singing this very rude song, very loudly, 
while standing in their classroom, traditionally the site where they are 
most assuredly not supposed to be singing rude songs. The performance 
was a triumph over perceived limits set by adult sensibilities, and an 
expression of solidarity amongst the girls against those who would 
censor them. 

Children Challenging Adults 

There is a distinct discourse within rude jokes concerning challenging 
authority, as embodied in a variety of different adult characters. The 
challenge comes not just the act of telling an inappropriate joke, but in 
the texts of the jokes themselves. Occasionally the jokes were relatively 
subtle, as was the case with one told by Carly, a 10 year old at P.S.2. She 
had been listening to a series of jokes told by 10 and 11 year old boys, 
and joined in at the level of obscenity that the boys had worked up to, 
after they had walked away for a few minutes. 

Right, Paddys Englishman, Paddy Scotchman, Paddys Irishman, 
seen this devil. So [laughs], Paddys Englishman goes, I betcha I 
can sit in his hand for 10 seconds. He goes, 1, 2, and then he 
jumps off. Then he goes, I'm away for a cold bath, because it was 
warm. Then he runs off, comes back, Paddys Englishman [sic], 
Paddy—said, I bet I can sit on it for 10 seconds, so he goes, 
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, and then he jumps off and says, I'm away for a 
cold bath. And so he goes into the cold bath and comes back 
again. Paddy Scotchman says, I'll be able to do it, so he got on, 
and he goes, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, and got off. Here they were, 
how'd you do that? And here he was, Chocolate melts in your 
ha—no, Chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand. 
[repeats it for my benefit, and to make the punch line that she 
nearly messed up more clear] Chocolate melts in your mouth, not 
in your hand.28 

33 



 

LANCLOS 

The listener has to think about the fact that the "chocolate" in the 
punch line is actually excrement.29 That combined with the famous 
M&M's slogan, "melts in your mouth, not in your hands,"30 allows Carly 
to indulge in a very round about way in the image of someone eating 
shit. At the very least, the joke involves someone who takes a shit in the 
hand of a devil, perhaps even The Devil, a powerful image indeed. Carly 
knows it is not obvious, and because I had a previous record of not 
always understanding their jokes on the first try, she "explained" the 
punch line to me by repeating it. 

Jokes involving rude names for the main characters reveal a great 
deal about children's perceptions of hypocrisy in a social world that does 
not allow them to participate in the dirty discourses that they can clearly 
witness adults engaging in. It is indicated in the following pair of jokes 
told to me by a small group of P7 girls at C.S.1. 

Annie: Right, there was these three people, called Shutup, 
Manners, and [someone prompts her, "Dog's Dirt,"] Dog's Dirt, 
right? They were all walking along, and then Dog's Dirt falls 
down the hole, and then the policeman comes over, and then 
Manners goes to pick him up, and then here he goes— 
[her friend interrupts]—no, you go like this, he picks him up and 
then walks on, and then this policeman comes up, and he goes, 
what's your name, and he says, Shutup, and then the man goes, 
the policeman goes, I'll ask you again, what's your name, and he 
says [with more emphasis] Shutup! And then he says, where's 
your Manners, and then Shutup says, um, down the hole, picking 
up Dog's Dirt.31 
[laughs] 
DML: And where did you learn that one? 
Annie: [someone] told me it. 
Mary: Right this jokes called Sit down, Dick out, Pee in the 
Corner 
[shocked laughter] 
Mary: Right. [there were three kids. . .] one called Sit, one called 
Dick, and one called Pee, right, and they were all in school, and 
they were all throwing papers at each other and being mad, and 
the teacher comes in, and goes, right, Sit Down, Dick Out, Pee in 
the Corner! 
[some silence] 
Pee in the corner! [for emphasis] 

34 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

On the face of it, the kids seemed to enjoy telling these jokes 
because they provided the opportunity to engage in forbidden, obscene 
language, and to make their peers laugh simply for that reason. The girls 
described the jokes to me as "dirty," and they were learned in this case (I 
found out later) from an older, male cousin. But a closer look at their 
content reveals further elements that may feed kids' interest in and 
enjoyment of these narratives. In the first joke, the policeman, a 
convenient symbol for parental authority, questions the children about 
what they are doing, and is rewarded by what could be interpreted as a 
string of obscene words and images, that is, the children's answer. 
However, that string of words is also a very accurate description of what 
is going on. Herein lies the children's dilemma. When asked, they are 
perfectly capable of representing the world as they know it, warts and all. 
Frequently, however, the adults in their world either do not know or do 
not want to know about this level of awareness among their children. For 
a child to rupture this parental illusion is to invite a variety of potential 
punishments, from simple silencing ("You mustn't say that"), to actual 
censure ("You're a bad girl for saying that"), and occasionally physical 
reprimands or threats ("You say that again and I'll give you a smack."). 
In the jokes above, however, the adult is never allowed to punish the 
children; the joke ends before that is possible, and the punch line is the 
child getting to say what is really going on. 

In the second joke, the adult, this time a teacher, is forced to be 
obscene when she punishes the children, Dick and Pee. In engaging in an 
activity that usually warrants punishing (saying obscene words or 
phrases), while in the act of punishing, the teacher reveals herself to be 
like many adults who tell children to do one thing while they themselves 
do another. 

The jokes that kids tell are told in very particular contexts, usually 
within a body of other jokes, and the sequences that build up are 
especially revealing. In one session, at P.S.2, girls segued smoothly from 
telling jokes about big phones (adults) telling wee phones (children) 
what to do, to a mildly obscene knock knock joke, therefore doing and 
saying something that probably wouldn't be approved of by an adult, 
inspired by the prior jokes concerning older figures forbidding younger 
ones from doing things. Older boys at P.S.2, during the same session, 
continually upped the rude 

35 



 

LANCLOS 

ness ante with each successive joke, building on the jokes told before, 
and clearly inspired by them, too. This sequence of jokes also reveals the 
implicit association of the violent with the dirty, a theme I will return to 
later on. 

One finds frequent representations in jokes and rhymes of 
older/bigger people/objects telling younger/smaller people/objects what 
to do. The following two Wellerism jokes are about "big and wee" 
conversations.32 They were told to me in the context of an extended joke 
telling session with a number of kids, ranging in age from 8 to 11, at 
P.S.2, after school. William and Mike floated in and out of the session, 
as they were frequently distracted by the indoor football game that was 
happening nearby. 

William: What did the wee [his cousin Mike cuts in, and they 
both say] What did the big chimney say to the wee chimney? 
DML: What? 
Both: You're too young to smoke. 
William: [fast on the heels of the last punchline]: What did the 
big phone say to the wee phone? 
[he answers himself] You're too young to get engaged! 

These jokes reference notions of what you should do (I knew at 
least one of the boys telling the chimney joke to smoke regularly), and 
being told that by adults (the big chimney, etc.), told in the face of what 
they actually do—smoke, act as though they are "engaged" –or at least, 
sexually active (or acting as though they are). These jokes also invoke 
adults saying that children shouldn't do things that they (the adults) 
themselves clearly do. The chimney is a thing that by definition smokes, 
the phone is a thing that by definition becomes engaged (in use); the 
implication of the characters in these jokes is that they are going to, and 
indeed have to, do precisely what they are told not to. This is more than 
simple resistance, but a complex representation of a certain sense of in-
evitability held by both parents and children: people in Northern Ireland 
do have families (if not get engaged) young, they do smoke,33 also 
starting quite young. In so doing they are reproducing their own parents' 
patterns of behavior, something that makes it that much more difficult 
for a parent to condemn the behavior, however much they might wish 
their children would do differently. 

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BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

Ambivalence and concern about authority are displayed particularly 
well in a series of jokes about doctors. When told by adults, they 
undoubtedly plug into a series of anxieties around health, the authority 
of doctors, and the National Health system, but with children there is 
additional resonance in the fact that doctors are another kind of adult, 
telling them what to do.34 

Doctor Doctor, everyone thinks I'm a liar35  
I don't believe ya' 

Doctor Doctor, I can't get to sleep at night. 
Well, lie at the edge of the bed, and you'll soon fall off. 

Doctor Doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains.  
Pull yourself together! 

Doctor Doctor, I feel like I'm invisible.36 
Next, please! 

Doctor Doctor, I feel like a dog.  
How long have you felt like this? 
Since I was a puppy. 

Doctor, Doctor, I feel like a bridge. 
What's come over you lately?  
Two trucks and a car. 

There was this man who went to the doctor's, and he said, 
"Doctor, Doctor, I keep fartin' and I'm stinkin'!" The Doctor goes 
out and comes back with a pole with a hook on it, and the man 
says, "Doctor, Doctor, what's that for?"  
"T'open a window, you're stinkin'!"37 

Frances: Doctor, Doctor, I feel like a deck of cards.38
  

Shut up and I'll deal with you later. 

Doctor Doctor I feel like a spoon.  
Sit down and don't stir. 

Note that the Doctor's responses are singularly unhelpful. The patient 
(child) is asking for help for frequently serious conditions, 

37 



 

LANCLOS 

some social, some physical-not being able to sleep, being stigmatized as 
a liar, smelling awful because of uncontrollable flatulence-but the doctor 
(adult) is flippant and uncaring, making a joke at the patient's expense. 
In several of the jokes, the patient/child likens themselves to an 
inanimate object-a pack of cards, a bridge-something to be played with 
or run over by cars, a thing without agency, without exercisable power. 
The Doctor/adult answers with a line confirming the patient/child's 
initial feeling: "I'll deal with you later," to the pack of cards. While the 
laughter generated by the joke is frequently at the patient's expense, 
occasionally the joke does seem as if the patient is getting back at the 
doctor, as in the case of the patient who feels like a dog, and has done 
since he "was a puppy." The doctor looks foolish here: if he had been 
thinking, of course, he would have known that the patient who is a dog 
now would have been a puppy when young. 

The unhelpful advice from the doctor is in contrast to the advice 
given in the following rhyme, which was used in this case as a counting-
out rhyme. The kids are directing advice and sanctions of their own to 
adults, and even seem to be assuming the voice of a doctor. 

Put your fags in the box sir39 
Yes sir 
Let me hear you cough sir 
[cough cough] 
Very bad indeed, sir 
And you are not on it for the rest of the game. 

Here the child performing the counting out rhyme takes over the role of 
doctor, and the reference to "Sir" indicates an adult is being addressed. 
The doctor appears to be giving "Sir" a physical; the "let me hear you 
cough" line suggests the "turn your head and cough" portion of a male 
physical, wherein the testicles are held by the doctor; for the purposes of 
the rhyme, this gives the child/doctor even more power over "Sir"/the 
adult.40 At the end of the counting out, the person identified as the 
smoking adult is not on it for the game. The child thus gets to put the 
adult in his place, controlling "him" physically, and judging "him" (I 
observed this counting out rhyme as performed by girls), and not only 
for the unhealthy practice of smoking. Ultimate playground power is fi-
nally exercised by not allowing "Sir" to play the game. 

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BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

Persistent Association Of Rudeness With Violence 

Contrary to the argument presented by G. Legman in his introduction to 
Sandra McCosh's work, the association of obscenity with violence is in 
the kids' performances of folk materials; this is not just an adult injection 
of violence as a substitute for sex, as Legman suggests, but an actual 
association made by the children, most often in their following a sexual 
piece with a violent one during a performance, or vice versa. The kids I 
observed were fairly consistent in following an obscene reference with a 
violent one. For example, the C.S.2 version of "Ip Dip Dog Shit" (cf. 
above) was swiftly followed by a version of: 

My mummy and Your mummy41 
Were hanging out the clothes 

My mummy hit your mummy  
A punch on the nose 
What color was the blood?  
[the person picked says:] Red  
R-E-D spells Red 
And you are not on It 
For the Rest of the Game 

Violent and dirty references were also occasionally united in the 
same piece of folklore. For example, the following was sung' by a large 
group of girls at C.S.2. The giggling when they say "underpants" 
indicates that they know they're not supposed to be saying anything 
about it, but they can do it in groups and it will be safer. 

My boyfriend gave me an apple42 
My boyfriend gave me a pear 
My boyfriend gave me a [kiss noises, hand to mouth as if blowing 
a kiss, three times] 
And he kicked me down the stairs 

[I kicked him] 
1 kicked him over London 
1 kicked him over France 
1 kicked him over U-S-A 

39 



 

LANCLOS 

And he lost his underpants! [giggles]  
I made him do the dishes 
I made him do the floor 
I made him do the baby's bum 
And I kicked him out the door! 

Starting after "underpants," the two P3s who started the rhyme were 
joined in their singing by 5-6 other girls, who lent their voices—
loudly!—to the last part of the rhyme, even though they were not 
clapping. There was also some dispute over whether the boyfriend was 
doing the kicking, or being kicked (indicated in brackets, above); some 
girls sang one version, and some sang the other. The version where the 
girl is kicking her boyfriend took over at the next line. 

Also at C.S.1, the girls sang the following parody right after their 
lusty rendition of "Mummy Mummy Mummy," (cf. above) just as the 
bell was ringing for them to return to class activities. The fact that it 
concerns a television show, "Barney and Friends," that is explicitly 
intended for children,43 and is insistent in its emphasis on love and 
sharing, makes the parody even more striking in the mouths of the very 
children supposedly targeted by the show. 

I hate you44 
You hate me 
Let's get together and kill Barney  
With a big axe through Barney's Head 
Aren't you glad that Barney's dead? 

On the surface, I think that this association is in the folklore, and 
made by the kids in their performance of the materials, because 
obscenity and violence are clearly things not approved by adults for 
children. If they are going to indulge in one, it is a small enough leap to 
indulge in the other as well. On a deeper level, I think that obscenity and 
violence, while perceived by the adults in their society as dangerous and 
anti-social, are being used by the kids as a kind of social glue. Those 
who choose to participate in the obscene or violent moments, in word or 
in deed, are united in their shared defiance of adult edicts concerning 
appropriate thoughts and behavior. 

This is not unique to children, of course. Violence within the frame 
of play is frequently cited as an arena for male bonding in 

40 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

Western European societies; in Northern Ireland, as in much of Europe 
and in the United States, this occurs at football, rugby, and other team 
sporting events. Using casual obscenity among friends is a way of 
indicating your level of comfort with them, and is characteristic of the 
"joking relationship" much cited by anthropologists in their descriptions 
of behavioral roles and expectations, especially among family members. 
So in one sense, children are no different from adults; they indulge in 
obscene and play-violent behavior as a way of bonding with particular 
groups of friends. On the other hand, they are still learning just where 
the boundaries of obscenity and unacceptable violence lay, and the 
variable nature of standards of obscenity, depending very much on social 
context. It is in the testing of these boundaries and standards within the 
frame of play that we can see that learning process taking place. I 
observed cases on every playground where the play violence shaded into 
actual violence; the nearly universal condemnation of such a shift by the 
kids who observed and were victimized by it speaks to the consensus 
among children that play violence is, in fact, "only playing." They know 
the minute it stops being "play," and when it becomes unacceptable. 

Perhaps what disturbs adults the most is the revelation in their 
folklore of potentially violent behavior in children, especially boys. 
Adult concerns about children engaging in violent acts came out in the 
complaints of a group of playground supervisors at P.S.1; they were all 
mothers with children at the school. They remarked about the older boys, 
that "all they ever do is fight" if they don't have a football to play with. 
Even then, the suggestion was made that boys would fight over football 
games if the supervisors did not intervene. While I did see conflict over 
scoring and rules among the older (P6-P7, mostly) boys at P.S.1, the 
most violent conflicts I saw were a result of interactions between the 
supervisors and the kids themselves. When one supervisor took a child 
out of play, and the child resented the reasons (or simply resented being 
taken out in the first place), that kid would frequently re-enter the game, 
against the commands of the supervisors, thus generating a verbal tug of 
war that frequently ended in the kid being banned from playing at all. 
That kid would then act up on the sidelines, throwing things at those still 
allowed to play, in protest. Many times, adult worries about violence, 
and a reluctance to let the kids work 

41 



 

LANCLOS 

it out for themselves because they perceive the kids to be at risk, seemed 
to do more harm than good.45 

Conclusions 

It is this implicit association of rudeness with violence, seen so clearly in 
the folklore materials, that appears to feed much adult anxiety about 
"dirtiness" among children. This is particularly pointed in a society like 
that in Northern Ireland, where children are only too likely to have quite 
personal experiences with violence. Parents may wish to protect their 
children, in limiting their exposure to forbidden language and folklore, 
because of this perceived link with violence. At the very least, parents 
can try to maintain the illusion that they are protecting their children 
from the one (violence), by limiting their children's expression of the 
other (dirty materials). Dirty words themselves are potentially violent; if 
they are used to hurt or insult others, they can have an impact often just 
as severe than physical violence. Children fling words at each other far 
more often than their bodies, and are aware of the power they have to 
make each other feel bad, simply with words. In this case, conventional 
rudeness doesn't even have to be used-intent is key, and if someone 
wishes to hurt another person, they can call that person a "melon" and 
have it hurt, because hurt was intended. 

Adult anxieties about child obscenity are not simply a result of 
generalized cultural constructs dictating proper childlike behavior, of 
course.46 Parents in particular can be concerned because such words can 
be interpreted as "fighting words," and lead to violence. In a place like 
Northern Ireland, where the threats to people from violence are quite 
real, and violence frequently impacts children both directly and 
indirectly, such worries are not idle, and are very much reflective of 
actual dangers. It is this adult impulse to protect children from violence, 
and to prevent their participation in it, that is also behind adult censure 
of child rudeness. It is more than just a violation of some abstract model 
of a proper childhood, but a very real warning sign that children might 
not be as safe as adults would like them to be. 

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BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

NOTES 

1. I carried out this research thanks to funding from the Wenner-Gren 
Foundation for Anthropological Research, the U.C. Berkeley Vice-Chancellor 
for Research grant, the U.C. Berkeley Humanities Graduate grant, and 
Lowie/Olson funds from the Department of Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley. 

2. I am grateful to Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes for this insight.  
3. JoAnn Conrad points out in her article, "Lost Innocent and Sacrificial  

Delegate: The JonBenet Ramsey Murder," that Americans in particular continue to 
struggle with notions of child sexuality. 

4. Such silencing also happens when children bring up other topics adults 
would rather they not discuss, in particular issues surrounding the 
Protestant/Catholic divide in Northern Ireland. 

5. Paul Willis presents an economic view of the perpetuation of working-
class perspectives among a small group of secondary school boys in Britain in 
Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs. 

6. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carol Sargent address this issue in their 
edited volume Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, continuing a 
discussion laid out in Sharon Stephens' Children and the Politics of Culture. 
JoAnn Conrad summarizes much of this in her article, "Lost Innocent and 
Sacrificial Delegate." 

7. For more on the apparent disqualification of children from Childhood, 
because of their violation of the standards of innocence and dependency, see 
especially Allison James and Chris Jenks' article, "Public Perceptions of 
Childhood Criminality." 

8. The folklore materials in this article are annotated in notes, by, indicating 
other collections of children's folklore where these materials, or variants of them, 
can be found. This particular rhyme is also found in McCosh's collection (202-3). 

9. For a detailed discussion of definitions of obscenity, especially regarding 
legal definitions, see Harry M. Clor's Obscenity and Public  Morality. 

10. Also observed by Iona Opie (32). 
11. McCosh (134) suggests a similar phenomenon around jokes; that 

is, that jokes can reveal children's attempts to escape from often adult-imposed 
ignorance of matters intellectual, sexual, and physical. 

12. In their collection One-Potato, Two Potato... : The Secret Education of 
American Children, Mary and Herbert Knapp record a shorter version of this: 
"Dog shit you're it. Out!" (26). In the course of her dissertation research, Jane 
Hubbard encountered a different variant in Derry that she calls in the first 
volume of Children’s Play, Songs and Games in 

43 



 

LANCLOS 

Derry, "more typical of a boys' choosing rhyme: Icky dicky dog's dicky, out pops 
piss!" (170). 
 13. Jane Hubbard also recorded this strategy of simply falling silent 
where the dirty word came in the rhyme. 
 14. Alison Lurie discusses this substitution of words for action as 
children get older in her essay "The Folklore of Childhood." 

15. The joking relationship was first defined by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown in 
his article "On Joking Relationships" in 1940. Keith Basso discusses the 
phenomenon at length in Portraits of "The Whiteman": Linguistic Play and 
Cultural Symbols among the Western Apache (67-75). 

16. McCosh (129) makes the same point regarding jokes, especially rude 
ones. McCosh also gives several examples of tricks and catches (21722), as do 
Knapp and Knapp (92-99). 

17. My colleague Jay Dautcher suggested to me that the knickers bust 
because of menstruation, and that's why people are disgusted. I think it more 
likely that Cinderella's knickers bust because of her expanding belly; she is 
pregnant because of going upstairs to "kiss" her fellow, and people are disgusted 
at her state. 
 18. For other Cinderella dressed in colors other than "Yella" rhymes, 
see Knapp and Knapp (125-26). 
 19. This was also recorded by Simon Bronner (105-6), and Iona Opie 
(31). 
 20. This was a mixed group of boys and girls, and while boys were 
leading most of the songs, the girls present were singing just as loud. 

21. Knapp and Knapp recorded a version of this as well (213-14). When I 
recorded this in Belfast, the Addams Family movie had just been shown on 
television. 
 22. This is Manchester United, the football team, and one of the favorites of 
kids from all schools. 

23. This rhyme and variants of it also recorded in America by Bronner (53) 
and Knapp and Knapp (25), and in Northern Ireland by Hubbard (vol.1, 172, vol. 
2, 62,106), and by Maurice Leyden, in his book Boys and Girls Come Out to 
Play (106). 

24. Hubbard collected several versions of this (e.g., in vol.1, 174) without 
any mention of knickers: ". . . bring your own cup and saucer and your own 
cream bun. [name] will be there with ribbons in her hair. . . " 

25. Also in Bronner (155), McCosh (241), and I. Opie (24).  
26. Also Bronner (156) and McCosh (242-43). 
27. Also see Bronner (141). 

 28. Notice that this is a Protestant child in a school within a neighborhood 
with a heavy paramilitary (UDA/UVF) presence. Paddy Irishman is in the first 
line, but is effaced in the body of the joke. The Scotsman is the hero here, which 
resonates well with some Ulster Protestant affinities to and for, Scotland as a 
prime site for heritage and allies. 

44 



 

BARE BUMS AND WEE CHIMNEYS 

29. As in the rhyme "Milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner fudge is 
made," the symbolic equivalence of things that are brown and potentially mushy 
makes chocolate a convenient stand-in for shit. 

30. Bronner (142) records a similar joke told about a black man. In that 
case, however, the man himself was "chocolate" due to the color of his skin. 

31. Also in McCosh (281) and I. Opie (14). 
32. Also in McCosh (212-13), Bronner (117), I. Opie (13, 111), and 

Opie and Opie (81-82). 
 33. Northern Ireland's consumption of nicotine and caffeine products 
outstrips the consumption of alcohol. 

34. These jokes are usually started and ended by the same person, making 
them rather more like couplets than the more regularly encountered riddling 
question. Examples can also be found in collections by McCosh (214-16) and I. 
Opie (14). 

35. Two jokes from P.S.2, P6es and P7s.  
36. Four jokes from C.S.1, P6s 
37. From P.S.2, P7s 
38. Two jokes from C.S.1, P6es and P7es 
39. From C.S.1, P4s; Bronner (68) collected a "Sir" rhyme that has 

him with a cold, caught while hunting polar bears at the North Pole. Variants can 
also be found in Roger Abrahams' Jump Rope Rhymes (60), in Eilis Brady's All 
in! All in! (64), in the second volume of Hubbard's collection (75), as well as in 
Leyden's (116,133). 

40. Thanks to Professor Alan Dundes for this insight. 
41. Also collected by Abrahams (133), Bronner (56), Hubbard (vol. I, 

173; vol.2, 40,63, 105, 138), Knapp and Knapp (26), and Leyden (1056). 
42. Hubbard (vol. 1, 179, vol.2, 78,125) records the gifts of the boyfriend as 

apples, pears, and then Opal Fruits (a chewy fruit candy similar to Starburst in 
America) rather than kisses; this rhyme is also found in Brady's collection (37-
38) as well as Leyden's (147). 

43. While Barney the big purple dinosaur and his television show had 
already had their heyday in the United States before I entered the field, the show 
and the characters within it, especially Barney himself, and his little green friend 
Baby Bop (a girl dinosaur in frilly clothes), were still quite popular among some 
younger (4-6 years old) children in Belfast during the time I was there. As was 
the case in the United States, many older children and adults were disgusted or 
annoyed by the treacly show, and such sentiments are clearly present in the 
parody song given here. 

44. Josepha Sherman discusses this rhyme and variants of it in an American 
context in her article "Gopher Guts and Army Trucks: The Modern Evolution of 
Children's Folklore Rhymes" (22-23). 

45 



 

LANCLOS 

45. In her article "Trashy Talk Makes Educators Cry Foul," reporter 
DeNeen Brown, in the May 12, 1998 edition of the Washington Post, reveals 
that in the local schools, the link between rude language and violence is made 
explicit in their conduct codes. One 17 year old was quite clear in noting how 
contextual language is, suggesting an awareness that "violence" in language is 
not an absolute, any more than rudeness or obscenity is. 

46. Thank you to Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes for stimulating this line 
of thought. 

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48