Robert Frost’s Ashes

General Information about Item:

  • Customary, Practical Joke
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Malcolm Robinson
  • Date Collected: This data was collected during a one-on-one interview in the library of Dartmouth College with Malcolm Robinson on October 28th, 2018.

Informant Data:

  • Malcolm Robinson ‘22 is a male student studying Russian Area Studies and Geography at Dartmouth College. He is originally from London. Malcolm participated in a canoeing trip before the start of his Freshman year at Dartmouth as part of the First Year Trips DOC program. He has 2 older brothers (Austin Robinson ‘19 and Gordon Robinson 21′), who attend Dartmouth, but Trips were his first true introduction to life as a Dartmouth student.

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context
  • Malcolm encountered this joke, which is not specific to the canoeing section of trips and is actually quite common, when he was a tripee during August of 2017.
  • 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 First Year Trips each year, Trip leaders will carry a bag that they claim is filled with the ashes of Robert Frost. This is supposedly to scatter them in the College Grant, the wilderness area where trip sections go as Frost wrote extensively on the beauty of the rugged New England landscape.  Eventually, they will choose a place that was allegedly meaningful to Frost to scatter these ashes. At this point, they will reveal that the ashes are actually chocolate powder and proceed to make hot chocolate for the group.

 

Transcript:

  • Gordon: Hi Malcolm, hope you’re doing well,  could you talk a little bit about yourself?
  • Malcolm: Yeah, so I’m Malcolm Robinson, I’m a 22 at Dartmouth College and I’m here with my brother Gordon Robinson. He’s gonna ask me some questions.
  • Gordon: Great, so let’s talk a little bit about jokes or pranks they played on your trip. Could you give an example of any jokes from your trip?
  • Malcolm: My first-year trip was awesome, I had a great time and they played a lot of jokes. For example one point during the trip, they told us that it was a Dartmouth tradition because Robert Frost was an alum we had to spread his ashes around the College Grant. It turns out that those were not Frost’s ashes, it was pretty funny.
  • Gordon: How did you figure it out?
  • Malcolm: It was pretty obvious when someone in the group figured it out. At the start, many genuinely believed that those were Robert Frost’s ashes.
  • Gordon: Alright, great! Thanks.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Informant’s Comments:

  • “They [the trip leaders] had some people convinced until we saw the bag. I think that this brought us closer as a group, and made me reflect on the beauty of the wilderness.”

 

Collectors’ Comments:

  • This prank plays off the trippees desire to participate in an experience that they believe is shared by the wider campus. It also shows them how they are part of a wider Dartmouth community of current students and alumni.

Collector’s Name: Gordon Robinson

Tags/Keywords:

  • Joke. Pranks. Practical Jokes. Trips. Dartmouth.

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