Histories

JOE'S JOKES

BY BOBBY COCHENOUR
AND EULLA DAVIS

GRANDDAUGHTERS OF JOSEPH HENRY JAMES

Joseph Henry James' jocular comments on life as he met it have immortalized him among the people who knew him best. Though it took Joe James to tell a Joe James joke, the following have been preserved through the years and are still in common use in this area:

One day as Joe was going down the mountain he met one of the men coming up and stopped to chat a bit. He noticed one of the man's horses was so lame that it was holding one leg up. Joe said, "Can that horse add?"
"No," said the man. "Why?"
"I see he has three down and is carrying one."

He used to like to tell about the Pacheco farmers. He said that they would raise a little corn to feed their horses to haul a little lumber to sell and have money to plant a little corn to feed their horses.

One day as he was walking up the street a man met him and said, "Well, Brother James, I'm sure glad to see you. I heard that you were dead."
Joe replied, "I did get shot, but I turned around so quick that the bullet went out the same hole it went in."

As Joe was going from Dublan to Juarez on horseback one night, someone had been putting a wire fence up near the road some distance beyond a limestone ridge and had just gotten one wire of the fence. Joe, not being able to see it, rode right into it and cut his leg almost half off. When he got to Juarez he went to Mrs. Crow, the only doctor they had in Juarez at that time. She had nothing to give him to deaden the pain. "Go ahead and sew it up," Joe said, so she started in on the job.
Joe just sat there telling jokes. She said she might have to cut the leg off. When she was about through sewing it on he said to her, "I'm only going to pay you half price." She wanted to know why and he said, "Because it's only half cut off."

Ida Skousen was out in her yard one morning and Joe came along and stopped to talk to her a moment. As he started on she said, "Brother James, you look shorter every time I see you." He said, "Yes, I get worn off up in the rocks."

Joe told me about a man who ran a store but could neither read nor write. He ran a credit account and he would just draw a picture of whatever he sold. One day a man came in and the storekeeper said to him, "Say, you owe me for a cheese."
The man said, "I don't owe you for a cheese."
"Yes you do," said the storekeeper. "I got it down right here."
The man said, "Let me see," and he saw the round circle. "That wasn't cheese," he said. "That was a grinding stone."
"Oh, yes," said the storekeeper, "I forgot to put that little square hole in the middle of it."

Brother Stowell went to visit Joe at a new home he had built. The house was right at the base of a hill. Brother Stowell asked him how he liked it and he said, "Just fine. I can go out and stand on the back porch and load my shotgun with pumpkin seed and shoot them into the hill and then when they are ready and my wife wants one I can go on the porch and shoot one and it will roll right down to the door."

Someone asked Joe James why all Mormons rode third class and he said, "Because there isn't a fourth class."

Joe asked one of his little boys to go get a hammer for him. After some time the boy came back and was standing there when his father asked him if he was the same boy he sent after the hammer. The boy said, "Yes," and Joe said, "Well, you've grown so much since I sent you I didn't recognize you."

Someone asked Joe once how he liked his farm over in Hop Valley. He said, "Just fine." He said he went out to plant some cucumbers and they came up so fast they threw dirt in his eyes. Then when he looked back the first ones he had planted had runners on and he went to get out of the field but found runners going up his legs and had to cut himself looses to get out. In fact, they were actually growing so fast, he said, they were dragging the little cucumbers to death (from Stalwarts South of the Border, pps. 322-24).