Title: Deer Droppings
General Information about Item:
- Customary, Practical Joke
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informant: Stanislav “Stas” Van Genderen
- Date Collected: This data was collected during a one-on-one interview in the library of Dartmouth College with Stas on October 29th, 2018.
Informant Data:
- Stanislav “Stas” Van Genderen ‘21 is a male student studying Russian Area Studies and Economics at Dartmouth College. He is originally from Cape Coral, Florida. Stas participated in a cabin camping trip before the start of his Freshman year at Dartmouth as part of the First Year Trips DOC program.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
- Stas encountered this joke first when he was a tripee during August of 2017 and mentioned that this is a classic prank that occurs every year on the cabin camping section of First Year Trips.
- This joke is typically played by upperclassmen or students leading trips on their first year 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:
During the cabin camping section of trips each year, trip leaders plant small pieces of chocolate outside of their cabins in the morning. The trip leaders bring their tripees outside and draw attention to the chocolate, claiming that the pieces are deer droppings left recently. As they speak to all of their tripees and build up the suspense and hype surrounding the droppings, a trip leader eventually takes a piece of the chocolate and eats it in a repulsing manner. This prank is designed to falsely disgust everyone until they too realize that the droppings are chocolate, at which point they often join in eating with their trip leaders.
Transcript:
- Jackson: Hey Stas, so I understand you went on trips when you were a freshman and experienced some pranks. Could you just tell me first a little bit about your background and where you’re from and what you’re studying?
- Stanislav: Yeah, so my full name is Stanislav Robert Van Genderen. I’m from Cape Coral, Florida, and I’m currently planning on majoring in Russian Area Studies and Economics. So yeah, I had a prank played on me during trips. I woke up, you know, one day walked out of our camping tent, and then my trip leaders were both there. They were like telling us to “hush-hush” because they said that they found some deer poop recently nearby within the past five minutes and that it still means a deer’s still around. Then, they started to start to sniff the deer poop and then proceeded to pick it up and put it in their mouth and start eating it. I fell for this prank. I started to like, you know, say, “Ew! That’s so disgusting!” And then they handed me, you know, a piece of that quote-unquote deer poop and it was just pieces of chocolate. I fell for that pretty hard.
- Jackson: Good. Thanks!
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Audio file
Informant’s Comments:
- “I couldn’t get enough of that deer poop once I realized what it was. Great prank.”
Collectors’ Comments:
- Stas’ experience with this commonly repeated prank from First Year Trips highlights the use of a fake educational moment and the rapt attention of the tripees as the object of humor. The unravelling of the prank into an instance where everyone on the trip eats chocolate together creates a moment of togetherness and bonding.
Collector’s Name: Jackson Baur
Tags/Keywords:
- Joke. Pranks. Practical Jokes. Trips. Dartmouth.