Title: Canadian Ground Fruit
General Information about Item:
- Customary, Practical Joke
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informant: Myself
- Data Collected: This data was collected on November 1st, 2018 via a recording of Jackson’s experience with how the Canadian Ground Fruit prank is usually performed on trips.
Informant Data:
- Jackson Baur ‘20 is a male student studying Economics at Dartmouth College, who is originally from Houston, Texas. Jackson is of German descent and had never been to New Hampshire prior to going on First Year Trips at the start of his freshman fall.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
- Jackson encountered this joke first as a participant in trips.
- This joke is typically played by upperclassmen or students leading trips on their trip members (referred to as tripees). As the objects of the prank, the new freshmen are supposed to be initiated and bonded together as a new class by going through the embarrassment of this prank together.
- Cultural Context
- This joke occurs on first year trips, which close to 95% of every incoming class at Dartmouth College participates in. Trips are used as a way to welcome each new class to Dartmouth and to break down whatever misconceptions they might have. Accordingly, jokes on trips are used often as they offer a great way to subvert expectations and to make everyone have a good time. Typically, the practical joke is played once the members of the trip and the leaders have left Dartmouth’s campus and are together somewhere in the surrounding wilderness of New Hampshire/Vermont. In this way, practical jokes like this one are very common to the Trips setting as they serve to bring everyone closer together through group humiliation/embarrassment.
Item:
To perform this practical joke, First Year Trip’s leaders from each trip will wait until their trips leave campus. Once they are in the wilderness together, one leader runs ahead and buries a pineapple that they brought along with them in the ground up to the tip of its pointy leaves/stem. Upon returning to their tripees, the trip leader will suggest that the trip goes on a walk or continues in the direction of the partially buried pineapple. When they approach, the trip leaders make note of the odd looking, half buried fruit and highlight for their tripees that they have come across a rare feature of Northeastern plant life called the Canadian Ground Fruit. Excited tripees inevitably gather around and are encouraged by their trip leaders to dig up the Canadian Ground Fruit and even taste it, reassuring them repeatedly that, although it may look like and even taste like a pineapple, it is not a pineapple.
Transcript:
- Jackson: I’m Jackson Baur. I’m a ‘20 here at Dartmouth from Houston, Texas, and I’m studying Economics. Prior to coming to Dartmouth, I had no experience with Dartmouth. I’d never even been in New Hampshire. So, First Year Trips were really my first introduction to the school. On first year trips, one of the most prominent, seems like one of the most archetypal, pranks that was played on us was this one referring to something the trip leaders called the Canadian Ground Fruit. This happened when I was on a hiking trip, and, once we were out in the wilderness, my trip leaders ran away from the group or one of them did and buried a pineapple on the ground up to its stem. When we came across this later, they pointed it out, drew a bunch of attention to it, and said it was something that only grew in the Northeast, a rare plant called the Canadian Ground Fruit. They encouraged us to dig it up, at which point we all noticed that it looked like a pineapple, but they really were insistent that it wasn’t a pineapple, that it was this thing called a Canadian Ground Fruit. And so, when we pulled it out, they encouraged us to even like, you know, cut it open and even take a bite out of it. They said it was edible, at which point, we realized that we were the butt end of a prank, that this was, in fact, a pineapple, and they had just fooled all of us naïve, will-be freshman into thinking that a pineapple was something that is just totally nonexistent, a totally made-up thing.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Audio file
Informant’s / Collectors’ Comments:
- As one of the most fondly remembered practical jokes of Dartmouth Trips, this practical joke is also one of the most widely repeated and referenced after many students are done with their trips.
Collector’s Name: Jackson Baur
Tags/Keywords:
- Joke. Pranks. Practical Jokes. Trips. Dartmouth.