Watch the Fire

General Information about Item:

Customary, Practical Joke
Language: English
Country of Origin: United States
Informant: Claire Azar
Date Collected: This data was collected during a one-on-one interview in the library of Dartmouth College with Claire Azar on October 30^th, 2018.

Informant Data:

Claire Azar ‘22 is a female student studying Chinese at Dartmouth College. She is originally from Indianapolis, and recently moved to Washington DC. Malcolm participated in a canoeing trip before the start of his Freshman year at Dartmouth as part of the First Year Trips DOC program. At Dartmouth, she is part of the Equestrian Team.

Contextual Data:

Social Context
Claire encountered this joke, which is specific to the cabin camping section of trips, when she 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 the cabin camping section each year, Trip leaders will light a fire outside the cabin This is supposed to be used to cook food such as soup and mac-cheese. The wilderness area where trip sections go is isolated and lacks a kitchen to cook food. On the last night, her trip was instructed to keep the fire going while the leaders went to collect more wood. Her trippees enjoined bonding over the fire, while looking after the fire, however, here trippees were getting worried after a few hours. Suddenly, her leaders returned, carrying with them Dominos pizza.

Transcript:

Gordon: Hi I’m here today with Claire and we’re going to talk about her trip.
Claire: Hi ok, so on the third day of our trip we just finished a lot of hiking. And it started to downpour and our trip leaders told us they were going to get more firewood.
Gordon: So what happened after that?
Claire: We kept ourselves busy for four hours and so to keep ourselves occupied we played we loved playing this game of Mafia.
Gordon: Did they give you any tasks to do while they were gone?
Claire: Oh, yeah, they wanted us to keep the fire going but like they were gone for a really long time. We started to get really concerned because it was dark out and it was raining and then you guys still kept the fire going we did we did what we were supposed to do and then then we like heard some like banging on the outside of the cabin and we like got really freaked out because we didn’t we had no idea what was going on and then it like stop for a little bit and then it was our trip leaders and they had gotten Domino’s pizza for us.
Gordon: So they really got you guys.
Claire: They did we were really freaked out. We were worried that they like died or something.

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

Informant’s Comments:

“It was a great experience, even with the rain our group really enjoyed talking and looking after the fire.”

Collectors’ Comments:

This prank seems like another example of trips leaders making the trippees work together and go through a tough or humiliating experience together. These are great way of integrating them into the wider Dartmouth community.

Collector’s Name: Gordon Robinson

Tags/Keywords:

Dartmouth Folklore Archive