By Tracy Sayler

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Prairie Grains is the
official publication of
the Minnesota
Association of
Wheat Growers,
North Dakota Grain
Growers Association,
South Dakota Wheat,
Inc., and the
Minnesota Barley
Growers Association.

Commodity prices, weather, federal farm programs, equipment that doesn’t work, the idiosyncrasies of farmers themselves- have always been a source of dark humor. Like these jokes, for instance:

• Two impoverished, ragged Africans are sitting in the middle of a hot, barren desert. One leans over to the other and says, "Here’s a picture of that farmer in North Dakota that I’m sponsoring."

• Right now you can make about as much money farming as a pickpocket in a nudist colony.

• What do the careers of archaeology and farming have in common? You dig in the dirt until you reach your ruins.

• How many farmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Four. One to change it, and the other three to reminisce about how good the old one was.

• Why is gambling better than farming? You blow your money on both, but at least casinos have free drinks.

• Where do farmers gather to talk about government programs? The "whine" cellar.

• What was the best harvest ever in the U.S.? Next year.

There’s a healthy reason for such dark humor. It serves as sort of a catharsis for farmers to deal with, well, the weather, prices, federal farm programs, equipment that doesn’t work, and their own idiosyncrasies.

Psychologist Patricia Keith-Spiegel identified eight major theories on why people laugh, and one of them is release; that laughter is a reduction of stress triggered by a conscious effort to unlock life’s tensions and inhibitions.

Author Melvin Helitzer, who has written comedy for television commercials and professional entertainers, and has actually taught a college course on the subject of comedy writing at Ohio University, says that humor is a powerful pesticide intended to help eradicate many of the hostile feelings in our daily life. It’s the use of mental agility to combat that which threatens to defeat us most often.

Like this year’s commodity prices, dancing the how-low-can-you-go limbo. One guy I know says he’s going to make T-shirts proclaiming, "I participated in the Great Grain Giveaway of 1998." When times get tough, some farmers quip about holding their own auction sales and getting a different job, such as becoming a greeter at Wal-Mart. You can only laugh half-hearted, because at the back of your mind you’re wondering if they’re serious or not.

Last summer, a Northern Plains farmer testifying at a Congressional hearing on the state of the farm economy said that, "there’s a standing joke that we don’t encourage our children to pursue agriculture as a career because it could be considered child abuse." Dark humor to prove a point.

Authority figures are often the butt of jokes, and in farm country, it’s usually politicians, bill collectors, lawyers and bankers.

• What’s the difference between lawyers and vultures? Lawyers earn frequent flyer miles.

• Two farmers were talking shortly after both had negotiated a sizable operating loan for themselves. "If conditions don’t improve soon," quipped one, "I’ll have to rob a bank." "If conditions don’t improve soon," said the other, "Then I just did."

Cowboy cartoon calendars are classics for dark humor. Like "The Back Forty" by Lex Graham, where in one scene the rancher is startled from his farm newspaper when his wife opens a bill and says, "This is their final notice. Thank goodness they won’t be bothering us anymore."

No, we can’t chuckle away our farm problems. But a sense of humor can sure help us deal with them. In the absence of remedies to cope with many of the farm ills out of our control, Reader’s Digest is right. Laughter is the best medicine.